Fiscal accountability and good budgetary practices are fundamental elements for the balance and sustainability of modern democracies.  When the states move away from these sound practices serious difficulties occur that may translate into political crisis.

      In some U.S. States there have been great fiscal imbalances as a result of the pressure from the more leftist sectors that claim for more expenditure and the more rightist sectors, equally strong, that want to reduce taxes. Such is the case of California, where the State and the Municipalities are having a hard time placing bonds on the market to finance their deficits.  The government referred to the possibility of obtaining federal assistance under the form of guarantees for the municipal securities, but in Washington they talk about limiting expenditure in order to avoid the so-called “moral hazard”. This situation has been compared to that of certain countries within the framework of the European Union, with the difference that, in the absence of a European federal budget, the moral hazard is impossible and each country must live with the consequences of their budgetary policies.

      In Japan, the Democrat Party, that has just put an end to an extended hegemony of the Liberal Party, has already announced that it is going to review, program by program, the draft project for 2010, recently prepared, and speaks of efficiency and accountability.

      Fiscal accountability, efficient expenditure and transparent and responsible management of the public sector’s resources have become key elements of the democratic governance. The articles included in this edition of the International Journal of Public Budget are related to these important issues.

      The work by Lubin Doe entitled Public financial management and corruption focuses on the circumstances that give rise to corrupt practices in the management of the expenditures within the civil service that reduce the economic yield and the social welfare; weaken the management of the public finance through procedures for the execution of the budget that are non-transparent and without accountability. They undermine the planning capacity both of the government and of the private investors and reduce the reliability in the government’s capacity to provide sound public goods and services at reasonable prices, in time and in the appropriate amount.

      Jorge Salvador Cajas Aguilar is the author of an interesting article entitled Public management in order to reconcile financial aspects with the activities planned in public budgets: follow up, evaluation and quality of spending in Guatemala. The purpose of this work is to analyze how to reconcile the planning and execution of the public budget, as well as its tools, whether legal, technical or otherwise, that gauge the products and results obtained in a given period, including the role played by the Public Manager, considering the definition of the new public management.

      Finally, we include an article by Luis Espadas Moncalvillo entitled Political, economic, technical and operative elements to generate government capacity and results in public policies in Spain that analyzes the legal and technical instruments with which the Spanish budgetary process is endowed, in order to guarantee the effectiveness of the fiscal policy measures that are gathered or applied in the General Budgets of the State.

      Thus, the International Journal of Public Budget makes a substantial contribution to the permanent discussion that ASIP promotes regarding the best way to manage public budget resources.