ABSTRACT
The relationship between policy analysis and public budgeting has spurred quite some debate since the 1960s when Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy administration, launched his Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS) in an effort to improve the allocation of resources and efficiency in the public sector. This chapter looks back at the 50-year history of budgetary reform in the United States and elsewhere to assess the progress that helps to establish a more evidence-based fiscal policy. It also looks at the efforts of budgetary reform from a historical perspective, and deals with the revival of performance budgeting as part of the NPM movement that emerged in the late 1980s. In addition, some argue that the New Public Management (NPM) movement, and consequently performance budgeting, has lost momentum, raising the question of what is on the horizon beyond performance budgeting. The chapter concludes that the efforts to introduce performance budgeting may be characterized best as performance-informed budgeting.
