60 - International Journal of Public Budget - ASIP

Editor’s note

Over the last few years, we have been noticing a trend to reduce the size of the State through the transfer of some of its duties to the private sector of the economy. The public sector continues, however, to manage very high percentages of the national revenue in almost all countries.

Budgets, thus, continue to be a strategic tool for societies, not only because in their preparation they continue to improve the joint selections as regards the management of increasingly scarce resources, but also because they have other duties equally important that are essential for the State.

One of them is to allocate resources to satisfy public needs with respect to goods and services in areas that may not be met by the private sector, including, of course, public properties, which may not be, in principle, discarded because everybody benefits from them once produced. Another, not less important, is to contribute to an improved distribution of the national revenue in order to consolidate what Aristotle called the distribution justice. Finally, the critical duty is to contribute to the economic stabilization, a fundamental factor of the democratic governability.

Thus, through public budgets, the States continue to manage a good portion of the countries’ resources due to the nature of certain specific responsibilities in charge of the public sector, which in the aggregate, once transferred to the budget, constitute the economic expression of the highest objectives of the societies based upon ethics and values.

This issue of the International Journal of Public Budget includes important works on different subjects of great interest.

The first of them, written by José Luis Ruiz Álvarez and entitled Public finance and economic growth: An overview and certain reflections, suggests that fiscal prodigality may damage the expectations of long term economic growth and that the experience on economic growth from the Latin American countries shows that certain structural factors, such as human capital, financial maturity, and public infrastructures, have a positive correlation with economic growth, while, on the contrary, high inflation rates and strong inconsistencies in the exchange rates have caused negative effects on the economy.

The work by Wally Meza San Martín, entitled Anticyclical policies and fiscal stabilization funds: Antecedents, advantages and disadvantages. A view of the Chilean economy, analyzes the political and institutional paths leading to a good fiscal performance.

The very interesting paper written by Yaya Moussa, entitled Public expenditure management in francophone Africa: A cross-country analysis, published originally by the Fiscal Affairs Department of the International Monetary Fund, analyzes similarities in the francophone African Public Expenditure Management (PEM) systems and whether there are divergences both between them and the French and among the francophone African countries themselves.

The Board of Directors of the Asociación Internacional de Presupuesto Público or Public Budget International Association has decided that, as from this issue, the International Journal of Public Budget should also be published in French in order to be distributed within the extended community of French speaking countries. This effort, that forms part of ASIP’s process for the expansion of its activities, is aimed at assisting an increasing number of countries to streamline the techniques used for the development, evaluation and budget design of public policies and financial management at the national, provincial and municipal level.