BOOK REVIEWS 1X9

Myers, J. (1959). ‘The critical event and recognitron of net profit’, 7Ir Arco~nrin,? RCV~EIU, Vol. XXXIV, No. 4.

Emmanuel, C. & Garrod, N. (1987). ‘On the segment identification issue’, An-ounti~~~ ajr$ Business Rerearrh, Summer 1987, pp. 235-240.

P. N. Dean & C. Pugh GOVERNMENT BUDGETING IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES Routledge (London, 1989). 157 pp. A30.00 (hbk)

It is hard to envisage financial numbers having a greater significance than in budgeting by national governments: in that context, accounting takes on unac- customed importance. Moreover, in practical politics, as the barriers between the first and second worlds come down it presumably becomes important that we spend more time addressing the profound problems in the third world. Govern- mental budgeting in developing countries should be a major concern of account- ants,

Given that most of the existing literature was written by economists and political scientists, Dr. Dean’s book is particularly welcome. The essence of the text is five chapters of country-specific studies (India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka), supported by an introduction and a concluding assessment. Cedric Pugh contributed the chapter on Singapore. The other four countries were chosen because they had experimented with performance budgeting and the author had available a host national in each country who was equipped to do the basic research he needed. Each national produced a standard report on their country and the author then spent three weeks in each place talking to the report- writer and interviewing other government officials. The chapters are the writing- up of the author’s views.

The stated aim of the book is ‘to present comparative empirical data’ (p. vii) hut this might be misleading. For the most part, the data on each country have been transformed by the author: even the standard reports from each national are not reproduced, for example. This leads one to wonder what the intended audience is since academics would probably want to know more about the raw data than is available here. In fact, the explicit audience is ‘those contemplating similar changes’, so that they can ‘familiarise themselves with different approaches to budget innovation and reach a realistic view of the likely constraints and the chances of success’ (p. viii).

In other words, this book is akin to the results of a consulting exercise. Govern- ments contemplating similar changes can take the results or leave them, on the basis of their trust in the author to have resolved all the research problems in the best, or in their preferred, way. This is because the text does not reveal how the author resolved the problems.

The basic message is that what we might call the cultural imperialism of the US, in exporting ‘rational’ governmental budgeting models, occurred before the models had been successfully tested in the country where they were invented. And despite numerous qualifications in the book, the author’s other message is

100 BOOK REVIEWS

reinforced throughout: the exercises have failed. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the qualifications themselves: ‘performance budgeting has not been a complete fiasco’ (p. 39); ‘it would be wrong to assume that programming has been entirely meaningless’ (p. 59); ‘was performance budgeting an unmitigated failure?’ (p. 138). These messages will be attractive to many in development studies, particularly in this country, and the book provides fertile ground for quotes to support the guilt of the West’s liberals.

Although the audience is not explicitly academia it is perhaps appropriate to make two points about this. The book leaves it to others to make the connections with the literature: existing confusion of terminology between performance budgeting, programme budgeting and P.P.B.S. is exacerbated; the UN manual of 1965 is crucial to understanding the export of government budgeting and is used to judge India’s case and in the conclusion yet is not used in the other cases; Caiden and Wildavsky (1974), which remains the classic in this field, has not been directly taken forward. The second point is that the book is less than 50,000 words and three of the seven chapters (including the concluding chapter) have been previously published and one other chapter has been previously published in summary form.

ROWAN JONES University of Birmingham

REFERENCES

Caiden, N. & Wildavsky, A. (1974). Planning and Budgeting in Poor Countries, New York: John Wiley.

United Nations (1965). A manualfor programme and performance budgeting, United Nations.

P. Gosling MASTERING SPREADSHEETS

Macmillan Education (Basingstoke, 1989). 190 pp. A4.50 (pbk); 412.95 (hbk)

D. Garbutt USE OF SPREADSHEETS IN BUDGETING

CIMA (London, 1989). 104 pp. 46.50 (pbk)

In writing about the mechanics of spreadsheets, there is a choice between gen- eralisation or linking the text to a specific package. Mastering Spreadsheets tries to steer a middle course by giving illustrations from several packages, and by a chapter at the end devoted to defining the main features and commands of 10 popular spreadsheets. It covers installation, spreadsheet construction, graphs and charts, and importing and exporting to word processors and databases. With such a wide range, coverage is necessarily thin: for example, in the discussion of copying formulae there is no mention of the concept of changing part of the formula relatively, while other parts are held constant. However, the presentation is workmanlike, and the basic functions and power of spreadsheets do come