An Analysis Of Non-Conventional Budget Adjustment In China

Budget adjustment is a little part in the whole budget proccess, only a few professors are doing research on budget adjustment and limited research has been done from the perspective of law and economics. Few scholars of political and public administration concerned about the issue of budget adjustment. However, budget adjustment is a very important issue, because of the final flow and the final value of some budget funds depend on budget adjustment. The non-standard budget adjustment in budget implementation has badly reduced the values of public resources divided according to principles for public interest, thereby reducing the government's ability to govern. In this paper, it first introduces the background of the study, in the following, proposes the concept of non-conventional budget adjustment then analyzes the reasons of non-conventional budget adjustment's development and measures to regulate budget adjustment, at last is the conclusion.The introduction is about the importance and necessity of non-conventional budget adjustment. The drawbacks of the traditional budget promoted the birth of the new budget model: performance budgeting, program budgeting, zero-based budgeting and new performance budgeting. These new budget models generally loosen the control of budget procedure and budget process, paying more attentions to outputs and outcomes. But they encountered some new problems unanimously: it is difficult to find effective and objective standards to measure outputs and outcomes. In addition, it has caused lack of responsibility due to lack of control. So far, there are no ideal budget models for universal application. Scholars again concerns about strengthening the control of budget procedure and budget. Since restructured budget system in 1999, China has produced tremendous effectiveness. But there are many problems still exist. In this paper, I only concerned with the problem of non-standard budget adjustment. As budget papers in China are still secret documents, which became the bottleneck for writing this paper. Survey achievements and research outcomes of some pioneers scholars are important information for the writing of this paper.This paper used three parts to discourse on non-conventional budget. The first part proposes the concept of non-conventional budget adjustment. The definition of the budget adjustment in the Budget Law is vague and ambiguous. Expense departments only when do the work for"unbalanced budget adjustment", they need establishment adjustment budget, and then submit to in-step People's Congress Standing Committee for examination. The budget adjustment planes in governments of townships, ethnic townships and towns, must submit to its parallel People's Congress for examination and authorization. This is unreasonable,"budget adjustment in balance"also should accord to budget adjustment process. The writer argued that, in the budget implementation process, due to the changes of income and expense polices and the changes of the size and structure of income and expense, if the actual income and expense are different from the budget approved before, whether balance or not, the budget behaves are all belongs to the content of budget adjustment and they need People's Congress for examination and authorization. Non-conventional budget adjustment is defined as the budget adjustment without performing budget adjustment process, which including"unbalanced non-conventional adjustment"and"balanced non-conventional adjustment". Sometimes, non-conventional budget adjustment plays positive roles, but it also plays passive roles more often in China budget practice. It is a waste of public resouces, weakening finance disciplines, and being opt for corruption. So it is urgent to take measures to regulate budget adjustment.The reasons for non-conventional budget adjustment are introduced in the second section. Bureaucratic budget maximization model is controversial, but it is also the authoritative theory in the textbooks on public finance so far, the revised bureaucratic budget maximization model could explain behaviors of non-conventional of budget adjustment in China. Because the bureaucracies pursue to maximize the discretionary budget, they try to maximize discretionary budget through non-conventional budget adjustment, and allocate the public resources according to personal preferences. There are many reasons which caused unconventional budget adjustment, including legal reasons, system reasons, organization reasons, political reasons and technical reasons. The concept of the budget adjustment in Budget Law is too narrow. The administrative departments make fragmentary public policies. Social relationships have great impact on the public policies and budget adjustment. Continuous changes of the leaders make public polices alternate frequently and budgeting technique is relatively bad.The third section introduced the countermeasure to regulate budget adjustment. In order to regulate budget adjustment, firstly, we should control the budget behaviors from two aspects: politics and administration. The administrative control includes that, ensuring the budget information open, adopting proper budget methods, obeying budget procedures strictly, implementing the accountability system, integrating the processes of the budget and policy. The political control involves that, redefining the meaning, process and responsibility of budget adjustments, strengthening the roles of examination and supervision of People's Congress especially the People's Congress Standing Committee. In addition, if we want to raise the level of budgeting, only when the budget very predictable, which assigns the public resources scientifically and rationally, it can fundamentally reduce the non-conventional budget adjustment.At last is the conclusion, which sums up the conclusions of this paper. The traditional budget is a kind of controlling budgets which encountered some challenges, western countries have tried to implement the performance budgeting, program budgeting, zero-based budgeting, new performance budgeting and other new budget methods. These new budget methods usually loosen the control of the budget procedure and budget process, but they are, without exception, have encountered some new problems. It is difficult to find effective and objective standards to measure outputs and outcomes for us. Besides, it results the absence of responsibility due to the lack of control. Strengthening the control of the budget process and budget procedures is brought concerns again. The development level of China budget already lags behind and currently, the goal of budgetary reform is to establish a controlling-type budget system. Thus, complying with the budget procedures strictly is the first task. So the practices of budget reforms both at home and abroad require us to regulate budget adjustment, and only in this way, can we make public resources used more effectively to enhance the governments'governing ability.