Local Budgeting in Turkey
Authors I. Sagbas and M. Bagdigen, LLOCAL GOVERNMENT FINANCE IN TURKEY, pp. 69-79, İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality Press, Istanbul
7 Pages Posted: 9 Jul 2009
Date Written: 2004
Abstract
A budget can be defined as a plan, which is utilised to organise bureau’s strategies and control activities. Budgeting at municipalities differs in many ways from budgeting at central level. Theoretically, budgeting seems more easer at municipalities to protect interests of citizenry if decisions are made “in a public forum open to taxpayers and the media” (Bland and Rubin, 1997, p.6). Also it seems that decisions can easily be persuaded at municipalities “to prevent financial mismanagement, excessive borrowing, inordinately high tax rates, and deficit spending” (Bland and Rubin, 1997, p.6). However this is an approach that reflects expectations. In factual life, such expectations would not happen in that way. Various experiments1 shown that expected attributes of budgeting are not as similar as in practice. Especially entrance of individual preferences of budgetmaking into the cycle of the provision of publicly provided goods and services differs features of the budget from its expected attributes.
Since the biggest portion of municipal revenues comes from central government as revenue sharing, municipalities have been bounded with available resources, i.e. they cannot budget spending more than their revenues. Also budget, at municipalities, must be balanced; revenues must be at least equal to spending and therefore, it is supposed, “this revenue constraint governs the behaviour of participants in the budgetary process” (Wildavsky, 1975, p.115).
In this chapter, the practice of municipal budgeting in Turkey is explained. For this purpose, we first give a brief historical background of the budgeting in Turkey, current municipal revenues and spending trend in turn and then focus on the process of budget preparation and its operation.
Keywords: Local Government Budgeting
JEL Classification: H72
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation