Conclusions — A Strategy for Public Finance

Abstract

This concluding chapter attempts to pull together the main strategic issues relating to public finance discussed in the previous chapters. Most people approach public finance from a particular perspective, whether as a service-specific policy-maker or practitioner, discipline-specific student or academic, financial auditor and so on. Being busy with the detail of the aspects of public finance for which they are responsible or with which they are concerned, they often cannot find sufficient time to stand back and think strategically about public finance. Hopefully, having worked through the previous chapters, the reader will now appreciate the extremely broad nature of public finance and the strategic issues underpinning it. It should, by now, be clear that public finance is not just a narrow budgeting issue. Nor, clearly, is it confined within the boundaries of any one discipline. Instead, public finance can only be studied and appreciated within a broad multidisciplinary perspective, besides economics and accountancy, also including philosophy, political science, sociology, public management, constitutional theory and so on. Given the limitations of the author’s own expertise, not all these areas have been considered in equal or sufficient depth.