Do imperfect budget policies lead to uneven year-end spending? The comparison of Ukraine & Canada

Abstract

Many organizations have budgets that expire at the end of the year and they may face incentives to rush to spend resources on projects at the year-end. We are testing this hypothesis using data from Ukraine’s and Canada’s state budgets for 2013-2017. Budget expenditures for the last quarter of the fiscal year exceed the average and for the first quarter they are lower than they should be on average. It is known that the in Ukraine a budget policy became a state policy only in the 90s. Until that it was a part of the centralized budget policy of the USSR. After the declaration of independence, Ukraine started to introduce the scientific substantiation and practical implementation of decisions and measures aimed at improving the performance of a budget policy, so it is important to study the nature of this policy in order to use the positive experience of the developed countries.