Intergovernmental grants are used in many countries to finance subnational spending and to implement national policies. However, the governance of grants is complex, and practices vary widely across OECD countries. The aim of this article is to provide a study of grant design that will be useful to policy makers. The article attempts to integrate both theoretical and empirical insights from the fiscal federalism literature as well as information obtained directly from practitioners concerning their experiences with the implementation of different types of grants. A typology of grants is presented, as well as an overview of the purposes of grants. The article concludes with some principles of grant design and implementation issues.

This paper reports the work that has been done by the OECD Secretariat on the project on off-budget and tax expenditures. The paper makes use of information that was provided at an expert meeting held in Paris in February 2004.

Since independence, Estonia has been at the forefront of institutional reform in the area of financial management. Budget formulation is divided into two distinct stages: strategic planning and preparation of the annual budget that is submitted to Parliament. This article describes key characteristics of budgeting in Estonia, including the development of the State Budget Strategy, the parliamentary process, the organisation of budget execution, and systems for accounting and auditing.

The budgetary process in the United States federal government is different from that in other OECD member countries. This is a consequence of the strict separation of powers that characterises the American constitutional system and of a long historical development in which new layers of institutional innovation were successively added to existing ones. The presidential budgetary process started to develop in the beginning of the previous century. Its first codification took place in the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, which required that the President submit a budget for the government to Congress and created the Bureau of the Budget, now the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). In the 1970s, Congress changed its own budgetary process through the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which created the Congressional Budget Resolution and established the Congressional Budget Office. Another layer of innovation was added during the 1980s with the aim of controlling the deficit. This began with the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985, commonly known as the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act, which in 1990 was fundamentally amended by the Budget Enforcement Act...

As government revenues diminish, budgetary discretions or flexibilities have similarly decreased. A pressing question is therefore how to minimize the inflexible elements or components of a budget. This article distinguishes between technical and political inflexibilities as they are reflected in the budgetary process and argues that the latter are much more difficult to correct. After drawing some examples from studies of the Dutch national budget, the article proposes the use of "reconsideration reports" as a means to alleviate the politically inflexible components of the budget, as well as a way to assess government programs.