The long view: lasting (and fleeting) reforms in public budgeting in the twentieth century

Abstract

The knowledge base in public budgeting has certainly grown during the twentieth century, but the most enduring features of public budgeting were developed or documented in the first half of the century. The line item budget is still the dominant format in government budgeting; incremental adjustment to the previous year’s allocation is still the dominant budget process. Later developments in public budgeting, like planning-programming-budgeting system (PPBS), management by objective (MBO), zero-based budgeting (ZBB), and performance budgeting have had very little enduring impact on the practice of budgeting, largely because they reflected presidential attitudes about the role of government in society rather than theoretical advances in budgeting.