Public Sector Governance and Accountability Series: Budgeting and ...

58 Salvatore Schiavo-Campo
country’s resources were deemed to be the personal property of the king, along
with the political evolution from absolute monarchies to constitutional governments.
In most countries today, including a majority of African countries,
approval of the budget (the “power of the purse”) is the main form of legislative
control over the executive, with public money spent only under the law.
And public money should be spent only under the law. In a few African countries,
however, the public perception persists that some of the country’s
resources are the personal property of the leader or of the ruling group. This
perception should progressively be dispelled and executive accountability
should be established as the system evolves toward greater legitimacy and
better governance. Here again, the public expenditure management system can
be seen as both cause and effect of the overall governance climate in a country.
The government
The general government includes all government authorities and their
instrumentalities and comprises three categories of government:
1. Central government includes all governmental departments, establishments,
and other bodies that are instruments of the central authority of
a country, plus the extensions of central government authority that operate
at the regional or local level but lack the attributes necessary for existence
as separate government units.
2. Local government consists of governmental units that exercise independent
competence in the various urban and rural jurisdictions of a country’s
territory, including counties, cities, towns, school districts, and the like.
An entity is treated as local government only if it is entitled to own assets
and raise funds, has some discretion in its spending, and is able to appoint
its own officers independently of external administration. These are
the key differences between decentralization, which entails devolution of
policy authority and deconcentration, by which the authority of the center
is exercised more effectively through local entities acting as agents of the
central government.
3. State governments are intermediate subnational entities in federal countries
(for example, Australia, India, and Nigeria). In unitary countries, the
intermediate level of government is usually called a province.
For decentralized or autonomous agencies, the nature of their function
and the source of their authority constitute the criteria for assessing the level of
government at which they belong (for example, a hospital managed by the central
ministry of health, wherever it is located, is part of the central government).