Research On The Public Budget Supervision In View Of National People's Congress

The public budget is legal annual revenue and expenditure plan, which is prepared and approved by the government, and is also a carrier of legislative supervision, which is different from other types of supervision by its high authority. Both principal-agent theory and public choice theory believe that the supreme goal of public budget and budget monitoring is to protect the public interest; otherwise the legislature cannot well perform the accountability of public. So the legislative branch's supervision for the public budget becomes very important. Nowadays, every country established a legislative supervision system to monitor the public budget, and United States and UK's system are much better. As the earliest country established the government budget and parliamentary system, United Kingdom's system has had a profound influence on other counties'legislative supervision system. Compared with UK's, the supervision for budget in American, even though produced later, but it formed a well-organized, integrated and transparent legislative supervision system with procedural norms.The supervision for the public budget, which is an important part of NPC's supervision, can directly affect the role and position of the people congresses at all levels. In the past years, the NPC and its Standing Committee carried out a lot of active explorations and practices, and accumulated a lot of good experience. So the effectiveness of budget supervision is growing. In the new historical conditions, our party put forward a major strategic task, which is to build a socialist harmonious society. The government budget plays an important role in harmonious society, so that determined us to place the NPC's supervision for public budget in a more prominent position. The supervision for the public budget is the duty and responsibility of the National People's Congress and it is also a very important way to represent the people to manage the state affairs. While, for a long time, the supervision right has not been fully executed, in essence, is just a hypothetical and formal power.Trough summarizing and drawing lessons from the international experience, the paper, relying on the budget process, develops a judging standard for measuring the effect of legislative supervision, which including 5 factors and 16 measuring indicators. Using the evaluation index system, we conducted an empirical and quantitative analysis of the effectiveness of NPC's supervision for public budget. If the total score is 100, then the current effectiveness of NPC's supervision for public budget can only get 57 points, which demonstrates that the supervision for public budget is only a formal power, and is still far away from the substantive supervision. Additionally, in order to make a more scientific and credible analysis, we conducted a survey and statistics on the NPC's supervision of the public budget through questionnaire.Currently, the NPC's supervision on the public budget still has some problems, for example, the relevant legal systems and the implementation process are imperfect,the problem in the process of budget making and other systems'problem. Generally speaking there are these problems relying in the NPC's supervision on the public budget: there are much more supervisions on the implementation of overall budget revenue and expenditure and less on the specific items of expenditure; there are more supervisions on budgetary fund and less on the extra-budgetary funds; there are much more supervisions on the financial allocation of corresponding level and less on the superior's; there are much more supervisions on recurrent expenditure and less on the implementation of major projects; there are much more supervisions in the meeting and less out of the meeting; there are much more statement languages on examining the budget and less substantive discussions, etc.Finally, combined with national situation, we proposed the specific recommendations and countermeasures to perfect the NPC's supervision for the public budget. Those are, to strengthen the building of the relevant laws and regulations, and enhance the authority of budgetary supervision; to improve and standardize the budget preparation, adjust the budgetary item; to perfect NPC's mechanism of budgetary supervision and improve approval process; to strengthen the supervision for the public budget implementation, set up accountability mechanisms for the public budget and improve the transparency of the public budget.