From performance to efficiency of government programmes’ financing in the subjects of the Russian Federation

Abstract

Government programmes as an element of strategic planning are meant to logically link budget expenditures with attaining long-term priorities of socioeconomic development. In the Russian Federation, the vast majority of regional budget expenditures are programme expenditures. At the same time, a plenty of practical examples evidence the imperfection of the established methodological approaches to financing government programmes, which impairs their outcomes. The paper aims to produce practical recommendations on improving the assessment of government programmes’ financing efficiency in the subjects of the Russian Federation. Methodologically, the research relies on the approaches of programme-based budgeting. The methods are logical structural analysis and synthesis. According to the qualitative analysis of the government programmes’ financing at the regional level in the Russian Federation, the major problem of assessing the efficiency of this financing is the insufficient coherence between its structure and expected outcomes. As a consequence, the target programme method is applied formally. The analysis of the case of the Sverdlovsk oblast demonstrated that the existing method for assessing the efficiency of the government programmes’ financ ing in the subjects of the Russian Federation actually evaluates performance rather than efficiency of the financing. In line with this, the paper formulates practical recommendations concerning the improvement of the method for assessing the efficiency of the government programmes’ financing and the development of the system for their financing in the constituting entities of the Russian Federation: to decompose target indicators more accurately, to avoid including financing of maintenance activities, to impose stricter requirements to the composition of the funding and the quality of goal-setting.