Rethinking Performance Budgeting: Presumed Dead or Alive and Well?

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book identifies the critical challenges in capacity building for performance budgeting and evaluates the reform paths that different countries may take to gradually institutionalize performance evaluation, budgetary planning, and performance budgeting. It discusses the importance of sequencing different reform steps and explores a contingent theory of reform space and appropriate reform strategies. The book examines the history and development of performance budgeting (PB) reforms in advanced economies. It also presents South Korea in the 1960s and 1970s, when the country tried to rebuild from the devastated economy after decades of wars and was trying to catch up with Japan and other more advanced economies at that time. The book reviews the historical development of PB reform in the Philippines, one of the earliest adopters of PB reform among developing countries due to donor pressure and the American influence in the 1950s.