Introduction

From budgeting's inception, public budgeteers have tried to connect funding decisions with accountability. Budgeteers profess an obligation to broader goals: "to serve the public by upholding justice, ensuring law and order, providing a common defense, protecting the helpless, preserving the environment, and advancing the health and welfare of the public". The performance-based reforms have focused attention more than ever on sharing information and decision making in budgeting. Sharing information about what governments do well, through performance measurement and reporting, can go a long way in reducing cynicism. Performance-based reforms produce a reversal of the traditional reform emphasis on increasing input controls to provide greater output controls. Decentralization and devolution as well as a results orientation in performance-based reforms are replacing traditional structures and institutions. The budget theory is not clear, although eventual use of performance information in budgeting seems likely. For budgeting, performance-based reform movement resembles much that has happened in previous budget reform episodes.