ABSTRACT
Control over public money and accountability to public authority were among the earliest purposes of budgeting. Traditional budgeting is annual (repeated yearly) and incremental (departing marginally from the year before). It is conducted on a cash basis (in current dollars). Budgeting can be done not only in cash but by volume. Volume budgeting may maintain public sector employment at the expense of taking resources from the private sector, thus possibly reducing employment there. Multiyear budgeting has long been proposed as a reform to enhance rational choice by viewing resource allocation in a long-term perspective. If budgetary practices may be described as incremental, the main alternative to the traditional budget is one that emphasizes comprehensive calculation. So it is not surprising that the main modern alternatives are planning, programming and budgeting (PPB) and zero-base budgeting (ZBB).
