The alteration of the business environment has heightened the role of management accounting and control systems (MACS). Not only the design of MACS has gained increased relevance but also the ways in which MACS are used. Based upon empirical data from 69 German manufacturing companies of different industries testing the developed research model, the evidence reinforces the knowledge concerning budgets and their use and essentially bridges the gap in understanding the relationship between budgeting and strategy by revealing the positive effects formal MACS perform. This book is important reading for graduate students of business administration and executives with focus on budgeting management accounting and strategic management.

Traditionally, economics training in public finances has focused more on tax than public expenditure issues, and within expenditure, more on policy considerations than the more mundane matters of public expenditure management. For many years, the IMF's Public Expenditure Management Division has answered specific questions raised by fiscal economists on such missions. Based on this experience, these guidelines arose from the need to provide a general overview of the principles and practices observed in three key aspects of public expenditure management: budget preparation, budget execution, and cash planning. For each aspect of public expenditure management, the guidelines identify separately the differing practices in four groups of countries - the francophone systems, the Commonwealth systems, Latin America, and those in the transition economies. Edited by Barry H. Potter and Jack Diamond, this publication is intended for a general fiscal, or a general budget, advisor interested in the macroeconomic dimension of public expenditure management.

Explicates political economy factors that have brought about greater transparency and participation in budget settings across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This title presents the strategies, policies, and institutions through which improvements can occur and produce change in policy and institutional outcomes.

Drawing on network theory from the organizational sociology literature, this book examines issues related to which organizational factors determine how employees influence the budgeting process. Data were collected from managers who participate in the budgeting process at a major apparel manufacturer. Social network analysis was employed to measure how the structure of the network of managers affects the budgeting process. The results show that budgetary influence is structurally determined and resides with managers holding central positions in the organizational network. Thus, while formal procedures determine which employees are involved in budgeting activities, only centrally positioned managers actually influence budgetary outcomes. The findings indicate that influence, not involvement, is the key to empowerment in the budgeting process. This research suggests that researchers and practitioners should be aware of an organization's social structure when examining a participative budgeting process. The difference between formal designs and actual influence is indicative of a "rhetoric-reality gap" which can impair the effectiveness of management control systems.

Dominated by multiple, competing, and occasionally overlapping theories, the act of budgeting is by no means a staid, dispiriting task. Kahn, Hildreth, and their group of scholars and practitioners show that budgeting is an institutional process, an incremental decision-making tool, and when correctly applied becomes a tribute to managerial and administrative efficiency. Taken together, the chapters provide an unusually coherent conceptual foundation for budgeting as a legitimate field of study, and demonstrate yet again that in its current state the field is truly eclectic but compartmentalized. They also show why it is so difficult to come up with one unified theory of budgeting—and that is one of the book's major benefits. It opens new areas of inquiry that, in the opinion of Khan, Hildreth, and others, will generate renewed interest in probing the field's theory and applications. Understandable and readable for those with limited knowledge of the subject but needing a sufficiently useful grasp of its various issues and problems, the book is both an important reference work for scholars in the field and a practical guide for students of administration, their teachers, and for managers throughout the public sector.

This paper surveys that state of fiscal transparency in the wake of the current crisis and looks at what can be done to improve it. It examines the relationship between fiscal transparency and fiscal outcomes; reviews progress in promoting greater fiscal transparency over the past decade; considers the lessons of the recent crisis for existing fiscal transparency standards, practices, and monitoring arrangements; and makes a series of recommendations for renewing the global fiscal transparency effort in the wake of the crisis.