If there was ever a subject which has been overwritten, over-analyzed and over-theorized with so little practical result to show for the effort, it is budgeting in poor countries. Report after report by reputable experts has exhorted, cajoled, and pleaded in almost identical terms, yet the very consistency of the findings and prescriptions of these reports indicates that little has resulted in the way of budgetary improvement over the years.' The same complaints occur with disturbing regularity. After two decades of criticism, for example, a 1975 report was still lamenting inconsistent classification used in budgeting, planning, and national accounting, lack of integration in the budget document, a short time perspective, inadequacies of traditional budget classification, academic model building, and over-centralization.2 There are still the same problems in gaining accurate, up-to-date, and timely information.3 Failure to budget recurrent costs of capital projects remains commonplace with disastrous results.4 Inadequate coordination between planning and budgeting is seen as a persistent problem.5 Those actually doing the budgeting in poor countries find few concrete suggestions they can activate amid the torrent of verbiage. The experts for their part are increasingly frustrated because the principles they espouse remain on paper.' What has gone wrong and why has so little progress been made? One problem would seem to be the assumption that the major difficulties of budgeting in poor countries are understood and agreed upon. There seems reason to question this premise in the light of difficulties in applying theory to practice. If the theorists are unclear as to their objectives, or if those objectives are inapplicable and unrealizable in the reality of the administrative contexts to which they are directed, it is little wonder that nothing much has happened to their prescriptions. This paper is directed toward an assessment of some common assumptions of the budgeting literature addressed to poor countries. Because budgeting touches so many aspects of government administration and policy, the assumptions made by anyone attempting to theorize about it are, of necessity, legion. Ten have been selected for discussion.