Myanmar’s budgetary punctuations before and after the 2011 budget reforms: Budget incrementalism and punctuated equilibrium theory

Abstract

Myanmar has implemented budget reforms to decentralize its budgeting processes, and this study intends to investigate how those reforms have affected its allocation patterns based on budget incrementalism and punctuated equilibrium theory. We empirically analyzed the government’s spending in seven sectors over 19 years. We found that political and institutional changes have different effects on different sectors. The sectors that the government paid attention to and set as highly prioritized policies showed more punctuation. After the reform, the government paid more attention to capital budgets to achieve its political goals, leading to more punctuation in the capital budget. We also examined the directions and frequencies of budget punctuation before and after the reform by extending the punctuated equilibrium theory literature based on both corrective and trend models. Different budget punctuation patterns were observed with different frequencies across sectors due to the unique characteristics of each sector and changing policy priorities over time.