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The Origins of the Federal Budget

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Hugh Rockoff
Hugh Rockoff
Affiliation:
The author is Professor of Econommics at Rutgers University. New Brunswick, New Jersy 08903, and at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
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Abstract

The federal budget, a long-sought goal of fiscal reformers, became a reality with the passage of the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921. This paper is concerned with one of the key expectations of the reformers, that the adoption of a formal budget would produce better estimates of federal revenues and expenditures. The conclusion is that there is little evidence of a dramatic improvement that could be attributed to the reform, although there is some evidence that the quality of the estimates improved over the long run. The paper then discusses the reasons for and implications of this finding.

Type
Papers Presented at the Forty-fourth Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 45 , Issue 2 , June 1985 , pp. 377 - 382
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1985

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References

1 The most important were The System of Financial Administration of Great Britain (New York, 1916)Google Scholar, with Willoughby, Westel and Lindsay, Samuel McCune; The Problem of a National Budget (New York, 1918);Google Scholar and The Movement for Budgetary Reform in the States (New York, 1919).Google Scholar

2 The basic idea, much elaborated since, is in Niskanen, William A., Bureaucracy and Representative Government (Chicago, 1974).Google Scholar

3 Much of Willoughby's writing was normative, but occasionally the analysis peeks through, for example, Great Britain, pp. 11–12.Google Scholar

4 See Penner, Rudolph G., “Forecasting Budget Totals: Why Can't We Get it Right?” in Boskin, Michael J. and Wildavsky, Arron, eds., The Federal Budget: Economics and Politics (New Brunswick, 1982), pp. 89–110, for a detailed discussion.Google Scholar