Introduction

Between 1967 and 1994, the budgetary policy of the Israeli administration in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (WBGS) seems to have been much like that of former British colonial regimes. Owen and Pamuk (1998:52) described the major budgetary principle of colonial economic practice as follows:

Colonies should pay for themselves without recourse to special financial assistance from the metropolis. This produced pressures for fiscal conservatism including the need to make sure that they balanced their budgets. This, in turn, ensured that, given the fact that the first call on their resources was to spend money on administration and the police, there were usually only small sums left for welfare or public works.