A Typology of Budgetary Environments

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Abstract
Budget reforms often have two goals that are not necessarily compatible. The primary goal is improving agency performance; the second implicit goal is exercising fiscal restraint to curb expenditure growth. The author describes four different budgetary environments to show that while fiscal restraint seems to be a necessary though not suf ficient requirement for successful budget reform, the interaction of reform and fiscal restraint actually may lead to unanticipated behavior among the major participants in the budget process. Reforms that seek to both improve agency performance and encourage fiscal restraint make the budgetary decision-making process unpredictable and more complex. This undesirable situation, from the standpoint of the participants in the process, is overlooked by proponents of budget reform. As aresult, the prospects for successful reform, in the author's opinion, are rather dim.

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