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particularly strong role for the Budget Committee of the Bundestag. 
5. Budgetary and economic forecasts are informed by networks of independent and
technical experts, who contribute their expertise at various stages of the process and in
various fora.
As well as the long-standing Council of Economic Experts which provides
independent views of a range of economic themes, including budgetary forecasts, there are
panels of experts tasked with preparing official economic forecasts of government, official
tax revenue forecasts, and with providing an independent economic perspective to assist

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the work of the Stability Council, which co-ordinates fiscal policy across levels of
government (see below). In each case, the experts’ views are regarded as providing an
authoritative input to the official figures, but they do not substitute for the final decision
on these figures, which remains the responsibility of the political level. 
6. The new top-down process promotes clarity and continuity in the medium-term
dimension of budgeting.
Each annual budget cycle involves the settlement of figures (at
detailed line-item level) not just for the annual budget, but for the following three years.
When a new annual cycle commences, the figures for that year carried over from the
previous cycle provide a clear starting point or “default position’ for the budget negotiations:
any new funding priorities must be accommodated either from better-than-anticipated
revenues (as has, in fact, been the norm over recent years), from identifying savings or cuts
within the baseline allocations, or from some combination of these approaches.
Mechanisms for identifying policy savings within baseline allocations are limited.