By Zhu Meili & Du Jing, China Development Research Foundation

Research Report, No.94, 2019 (Total 5594) 2019-6-18

Abstract: The reform of budget performance management has advanced across the board these days. However, research findings show that the reform is still subject to the lack of executives’ motivation, the vague definition of institutions’ principal responsibility and the sluggish advance of supporting reform measures, which have resulted in an improper reform synergy. The experience of foreign performance budget reform indicates that the key to pushing forward reform lies in fully mobilizing the enthusiasm of participating entities, encouraging the budget and the financial departments to shoulder and fulfill their respective responsibilities, flesh out the design of performance index, and boost the performance capacity enforcement of relevant departments. Related policy options are proposed in the following aspects. The role of the Party needs to be given full play in coordinating different interest groups, cut down performance management costs and strengthen grassroots-level budget performance management; the parallel evaluation systems need to be integrated with budget performance management at the core; further flexibility needs to be delegated to relevant departments and make them actively pursue performance from their own initiative rather than passively do their job at the beck and call of their senior departments; a simple but practical-designed evaluation mechanism needs to be formed and is featured by an inter-connected performance between the higher and lower levels of governments as well as by the coordination of multiple departments so that the comprehensive implementation of budget performance management could be moved forward.

Key words: budget performance management, foreign experience, policy options on further advance