Budget Reform and Political Reform: Conclusions from Six Cities

Municipal budgeting, especially in larger cities, has changed over the last 20 years. A variety of tools like program formats, long-term revenue and expenditure projections, management-by-objectives (MBO), zerobased and target-based budgets, capital budgeting, and strategic planning have become commonplace (Poister and Streib, 1989). A surprisingly large number of cities are using some performance monitoring (Poister and Streib, p. 242).