Irene S. Rubin

Economic Development Incentives The Poor (Cities) Pay more

After establishing a way of classifying economic development incentives, this article examines four different explanations of why cities differ in their willingness to provide such incentives to encourage business growth. In order of explanatory power the explanations are citizen need, administrative capacity, fiscal stress, and the process of growth. Specific types of cities are more willing to use some incentives than others. Some underlying rules are suggested to explain why city officials make the decisions they do about economic development issues. It is the symbolic value of the actions rather than their concrete consequences that motivate much of local economic development activity.

Budget Theory and Budget Practice: How Good the Fit?.

Theory in budgeting, like much of public administration, has been of two kinds, descriptive and normative. Descriptive theory is based on close observation or participation in public sector activities. Theorists describe trends, sequences of events, and infer causes, paying attention to local variations as well as uniformities across cases. Normative theory-advice-may be based on a much narrower range of observations than descriptive theory and its proposed solutions may be based on values rather than observations. If the explanatory power of the descriptive theory is too weak, or if the advice of normative theory is not adopted by public officials or is adopted and abandoned because it does not work, the gap between theory and practice may become unacceptably wide.

Budgeting for Accountability: Municipal Budgeting for the 1990s

The emphasis of a public budget depends on the time and circumstances in which it is developed. During the 1990s, for example, the emphasis has increasingly been on accountability due to widespread public belief in recent years that government is uncontrollable and responds only to special interests. Over the past few years, local budgeters have begun to adapt to this new environment by improving the accountability of the budget to the public. This article summarizes some of the changes taking place and suggests some additional changes that could be adopted to make local budgeting more accountable.

Managing Organizational Retrenchament Preconditions, Deficiencies, and Adaptations in the Public Sector

This article presents a discussion of the preconditions necessary for managing a contraction. It examines the constraints operative in the public sector which exclude or limit the availability of the prerequisites for public managers to effectively manage retrenchment. Then it describes how a public organization without these prerequisites behaves under conditions of fiscal stress by using a multistage model of public sector contraction that includes several political dimensions as well as organizational factors. Several of the models components are taken from the experience of New York Citys government since its fiscal crisis of 1973-1974. The article concludes that retrenchment forces public organizations into a position of excessive oversight which stifles initiative and encourages errors. Therefore, over the long run, retrenchment may make public organizations even less effective and less capable of dealing with their problems.

Budget Reform and Political Reform: Conclusions from Six Cities

Municipal budgeting, especially in larger cities, has changed over the last 20 years. A variety of tools like program formats, long-term revenue and expenditure projections, management-by-objectives (MBO), zerobased and target-based budgets, capital budgeting, and strategic planning have become commonplace (Poister and Streib, 1989). A surprisingly large number of cities are using some performance monitoring (Poister and Streib, p. 242).

Who Invented Budgeting in the United States

Who (in the United States) invented public budgeting? Irene Rubin contends that, although business is often touted as the modelforgovemmental improvements in budgeting and accounting, it turns out that govemment officials and academics, often working in concert, invented, imported, and modified public budgeting in the United States. They were encouraged, often pushed, by business groups but generally resisted copying business practices, which were not very good at the time. The story of the origins of budgeting in the United States was to some extent intentionally distorted to make business owners look good. The extent to which business was wrongly described as the origin of improved public practices is suggestive of similar efforts today to ascribe good practices to businesses and bad practices to government. It is important to remember, Rubin argues, that in the early part of this century, public officials responded to criticisms about increased expenditures and lack of sufficient financial control by improving their own management. We should take pride in their accomplishments, and in our capacity to correct our own mistakes. We should be wagy of assuming that business practices are what the public sector needs. It has often been argued that the business community was the origin and model of improved public financial practices in the United States, including budgeting, in the early 20th century. This point of view is not the only one in the literature, but it has been around for a long time. Early budget reformers often attributed their proposals to businessmen. Henry Bruere, one of the directors of the New York Bureau of Municipal Research, attributed some of the bureaus budget innovations to railroad financier E. H. Harriman; Frederick Cleveland, one of the most important founders and promoters of executive budgeting in the United States, claimed the methods of accounting he wanted to introduce to the public sector were already established in the management of private corporations (Cleveland, 1980).

The State of State Budget Research

This essay examines the research on state budgeting that has appeared in Public Budgeting & Finance since its founding, with a view to summarizing the key themes and outlining what we have yet to learn. It also offers some suggestions for future research strategies, how to pick topics and cases, and theorize about the findings. The goal is not to utilize theories from other fields which may or may not be relevant to budgeting, but to theorize about what we know and get to a deeper level of understanding.

Budget Reform in St. Louis: Why Does Budgeting Change?

Budget reforms have washed over U.S. cities at odd intervals. In the 1880s and 1890s, budgeting began either in the controllers office or with a group of officials commonly called a Board of Estimate. In the early 1900s, the executive budget reforms took shape, with increasing authority for the formation of the budget proposal located in the mayors office. In the late 1960s, the emphasis was more on program budgeting and technical analysis for allocating between competing programs. More recently, cities have been integrating the goals orientation of management by objectives (MBO) and the evaluation focus of performance budgeting into their budget formats and processes. The major changes that have occurred over the last 20 years have been dramatic. They call attention to the fact that public administration knows very little about when budget reforms get adopted and why. This article explores the question of why these dramatic changes in municipal budgeting have taken place.

Early Budget Reformers: Democracy, Efficiency, and Budget Reforms:

An examination of the writings of the early budget reformers suggests a major break between the progressive era reform proposals in the early 1900s and the budget proposals of the Taft era conservatives beginning in 1912. Progressives favored expansionary, activist government; Taft conservatives wanted to shrink government. Progressives focused more on cost effectiveness; Taft conservatives focused more on efficiency and cost cutting. Progressive reformers trusted the public and, to some extent, its representatives in the legislature, while Taft conservatives lacked confidence in the public and its representatives. The Taft era proposals had a major influence on the 1921 Budget and Accounting Act, which gave the federal government an executive budget process and also influenced budgeting in some states, such as New York and Maryland.

Structural Theories and Urban Fiscal Stress

This article compares neo-Marxist and public choice theories of urban fiscal stress with descriptive data about the generation and consequences of fiscal stress in a number of cities in the 1970s. Each theory was found to be only partly descriptive of real life events. To create a more complete description, I integrate commensurable elements of neo-Marxism and public choice theory with more contingent factors, such as political vulnerability to citizen demands and the quality of local management. The article then describes the way cities have been changing as a result of fiscal stress and the implications of this process for theories of fiscal strain.