China's Central Government Departments' Budget Openness System Research

With the reform of China's administrative system and the development of democracy in a civil society,the government's fiscal budget openness system develops continuously and central government departments open their fiscal budget gradually.In 1999,the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress adopted the "Decision on Strengthening the Central Government Budget",and put forward the requirements of compiling department budget.Since then,the departmental budget began open to the NPC deputies.In 2007,the "Government Information Disclosure Regulation" lists the fiscal information as key public information,which deepens the fiscal budget open.Besides,the government work statement of 2015 points out that new progress should be made in promoting fiscal and taxation reform.The budget system should be fully standardized,open and transparent.Except the secret information,all fiscal data should be under the comprehensive supervision of the society.The effect of the budget openness is to reduce the information asymmetry between government and the public,aiming to protect the civil rights which means with the access to the fiscal budget information,citizens could understand the assignment and use of public resources.In other words,budget openness provides the information that citizens need to affect the fiscal budget management and use.As a result,the public could exercise the political rights of participation and making decision.However,there are some problems that the current central government's budget openness system are carrying,such as citizens and their deputies failing to read the budget report,the final cost being beyond the budget setting,the repeated audit problems and information lack of the budget report content.These problems make the public expectations down,and cause damage to the government's credibility and authority.To promote the current budget openness system,this paper introduces the current central government department budget openness system in China,and take A-department's fiscal budget report as the result of open system execution.By comparing the system and report with the advanced representatives in other world,this paper sums up some problems and causes exposed by the regulation and execution of budget openness system,and finally offers some advice for promotion.This paper is divided into six parts:the first part is the introduction,including the reasons and significance of choosing this topic,research proposal,research methods and innovations;the second part mainly talks about the government's transparent budget theory,which includes Public finance theory,Public management theory and Principal-agent Theory,together with the literature review.And according to the IBP's latest open budget survey report,the second part selects some typical practice in some developed countries,such as United States,Australia and UK,besides,NSF's budget report is chosen as a representative of the advanced execution of relative open system for study.In the end of the second part,some advanced experience is concluded,including the budget openness system made in law-level and specific laws,the NGO's participation in the open procedure,the report published in different forms for various information demands and effective reading,not only the budget files but also the budget passing-procedure being opened.The third part introduces China's current central departments'budget openness system,including the development procedure,specific regulations and the work frame,and selects central A-department,which takes similar administrative role as NSF for effective comparison.Firstly,the development and achievement of A-department's open budget work is introduced,especially in the field of the cost of cars,overseas travel and host meetings,collectively known as "the three public expenses",then some index are set to evaluate the quality of latest central A-department's open fiscal budget report.The fourth part analyses the report as the execution of current budget openness system,and points out some problems such as the audit problems repeated,lack of information in report,the details of projects not published and the budget execution obviously off the pre-setting without explanation,which mainly caused by ambiguous regulation and weak accountability.The fifth part put some suggestions to perfect China's central departments' budget openness system such as promoting relative regulation with expanding report content and forms,listing key data for better understanding of report,improving the independence of budget open work frame and accountability,upgrading the regulations to law.The sixth part is the conclusion and outlook.China's administrative organization structure is pagoda-shaped,which means the fiscal budget openness system central government departments carry out has a lot of authority across the nation,besides,more and more attention is paid to fiscal budget report by the public in recent years.Therefore,how to improve the fiscal budget openness system of the central level makes sense.Current study or research of budget openness system mainly focused on financial transparent in a wide range or law-making,which takes the angle of qualitative macroeconomic research,lack of micro empirical study.Based on the introduction and comparison of budget openness system,this paper takes the latest budget reports as research objects,by setting some index for survey and making comparison between A-department and NSF,to points out the problems exposed in the execution of budget openness system and offers some advice for a better central government budget openness system in future.