An Exploration into the Familiar and the New: Public Budgeting in Developing Countries

World poverty is well documented. It is estimated that 1.2 billion people live on less than a dollar a day (Bryant & Kappaz, 2005, p. 17). Another one and a half billion people, who are not among the “extreme poor”, suffer “chronic financial hardship and a lack of basic amenities such as safe drinking water and functioning latrines”. Together, these two groups makeup around 40 percent of humanity (Sachs, 2005, p. 18). Nor is the position improving: Joseph Stiglitz notes that “over the last decade of the twentieth century, the actual number of people living in poverty actually increased by almost 100 million”, at a time when total world income was increasing by an average of 2.5 percent annually (Stiglitz, 2002, p. 5). The position of children – the generation of the future – is of particular concern.