Ensuring transparency of key public finance authorities

Several systems of budgeting have been introduced into practice over the last fifty years. While more popular budgeting systems such as incrementalism and Planning Programming Budgeting Systems (PPBS) have seen continued popularity and resilience as budgeting systems, zero-based budgeting (ZBB) has experienced a resurgence in popularity, as governments and public organizations alike seek to control wasteful spending within their departments. The aim of this article is to provide users with a step-by-step guide to designing zero-based budgeting for public organizations. This article begins by describing the foundations of zero-based budgeting, as well as providing a brief comparative exploration of ZBB alongside other contemporary budgeting systems. To gain a deeper understanding of zero-base budgeting and the potential, as well as the drawbacks that this type of budgeting system holds, this paper examines the actual experience of several organizations that have implemented the zero-based budgeting method. This is accomplished by conducting a critical review of all the research and case studies that have been conducted on this topic. It is the hope of the author that both public sector and non-profit organizations will benefit from the findings of this paper when considering the implementation of their own zero-based budgeting, resulting in better planning and performance evaluation.

The size of the public sector is an important tool in public governance. Public sector size may fuel both economic growth and political influence over the economy.
By compiling and processing data from different sources of public accounts the paper aims at mapping the development of key financial indicators for the Norwegian central government sector during the transition period from the mid 19th to the mid 20th century. The data enable us to give measures of the size of the public sector alone and compared to the overall economy.
It is found that the sector started its continuous growth before politicians deliberately started to increase the sector’s size of the total economy. The paper also finds that an increase of the public sector often, but not always, reflects political economy regimes. Persistent growth in public finances as a tool for economic policy making did not take place before the introduction of the social-democratic regime in 1935.
The paper also concludes that economic growth started before the growth in the public sector, suggesting that public sector growth might as well be a result of economic growth or vice versa.

Environmental responsibility mechanism in the public sector of the economy has an important sense in UN Sustainability Development Goals achievement, as well as in ensuring the competitiveness of the state-owned companies and the state as a whole. Sustainability concept, concept of “smart cities and smart communities” and the implementation of public administration reform, the necessity to increase the transparency of state-owned companies and the responsibility of municipalities to communities determine the reasonability and urgency in environmental responsibility mechanism development. Systematization and comparative analysis of world and national experience of environmental responsibility mechanism development in the public sector of the economy were made. The author’s approach to the structuring of the mechanism of environmental responsibility in the public sector was developed. Public policy peculiarities implementation in the field of environmental responsibility were investigated considering the levels of regulation of such liability: in state-owned companies as models for other sectors of the economy; in public authorities and municipalities.