Public expenditure management in Asian countries

Expenditure management practices in Asia shows that these vary from the ‘still-in-transition’ China, to the colonial concerns of compliance in the South Asian countries, to more advanced experiments in Singapore. Budgetary practices in many of these countries are characterized by incremental and bottom-up budgets, across-the-board cuts in times of fiscal stress, and little or no analysis of costs and outputs. At the same time, resource allocation as a percentage of GDP and accrual accounting are being tried in some other countries. The paper suggests that the institutional changes now underway in these countries and the imperative need to control expenditure could bring meaningful changes.