Abstract
Government responses to recent financial crises have imposed heavy burdens on the public finances of many countries, and exposed weak links between fiscal information sources: budgets, accounts and finance statistics. In order to better understand the causes and effects of financial crises—as well as to predict them early and manage them effectively—the International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently proposed a standard for fiscal forecasting. Viewing this alignment proposal as the culmination—a ‘grand convergence’—of earlier attempts at linking and improving these three fields, the authors describe and assess the IMF initiative, and discuss its likely impact.
Notes
*The views expressed in this paper do not necessarily reflect the positions of the organizations with which the authors are affiliated.
* In the absence of a standard definition of accrual budgeting, it is difficult to be definitive about the extent to which it is practised. The US government looked to Australia, Iceland, The Netherlands New Zealand and the UK for relevant experience (GAO, Citation2000).