Korea is in the initial stages of implementing performance-based budgeting. The system was introduced as part of a comprehensive fiscal reform package in the late 1990s. This article discusses the background, framework and implementation of performance budgeting and its impact in the budget process.

Top-down budgeting emerged in the 1990s as a response to fiscal crisis. Previously, the traditional bottom-up approach to budget formulation had conferred centralised authority for resource allocation on the finance ministry. Then, in an attempt to control the growing fiscal deficits in the...