From Quek Soo Beng

Every year, we are presented with a Budget for the following fiscal year, and the Minister for Finance will articulate policies, strategies and plans that take a number of years to fund and complete.

Many developed countries project such plans, which are quantifiable in five-year (or longer) moving Budget plans that are dynamic and usually timed with the presentation of their annual Budgets. Hong Kong and China have been publishing these.

Long-term Budgets are useful in many respects. They manifest medium- and long-term plans of various ministries and their revenue and expenditure projections are presented in easy-to-understand financial terms.

They also provide transparency of planning assumptions and distribution and pacing of budgeted income and spending for various purposes. They facilitate a platform for regular communication by the government to the populace and for open budgetary debate and revisions in and outside of Parliament. The business community too will benefit from the greater clarity and certainty.

For instance, the White Paper on Population would have enjoyed greater clarity and the aforementioned benefits if the financial impacts were imputed in a long-term (to 2020) Budget based on its projections. It could have also enjoyed greater buy-in if its projections were presented with different scenarios. It is timely for the Government to include a medium-term moving Budget in its annual budgetary process to meet the demands of an increasingly discerning populace.