Taking Stock: Assessing and Improving Performance Budgeting Theory and Practice

Abstract

Since the passage of the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) of 1993, the past 20 years represent one of the most remarkable eras for performance budgeting initiatives in the United States. As a result, many studies about this tool have been conducted and published. Based on a systematic review of articles on research related to performance budgeting in major journals in the ten years between 2002 and 2011, this study assesses how performance budgeting research has evolved over time, reviews its accomplishments, and suggests a few directions for future study, such as the need to control for different intervening factors to establish causality, the need for more coherent theoretical frameworks to guide empirical work and structure the relationship between causal factors, and the need for methodological diversity. We also present a few long-standing questions about performance budgeting that future studies may revisit carefully.