ABSTRACT
The size and distribution of budgets have a good deal to say about the ways of life of a people, or, at least, the ruling elites. Like other human artifacts, budgets are cultural constructs expressing the desired relationships among people—maintaining, increasing, or decreasing the differences among them. A major clue to understanding budgeting is the extraordinary complexity of the calculations involved. In any large organization, a huge number of items must be considered, many of which are of considerable technical difficulty. The degree of incremental change varies with the type of budgetary process. Central governments in rich and certain nations exhibit the positive incrementalism that goes with growth. The budgeting of poor nations is nonincremental because they lack the stability to maintain the base. Political structures for processing the budget differ both in the absolute number of institutions significantly involved and in their relative power.
