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viii) A user-friendly Summary or “Citizen’s Budget” should accompany the budget
documentation,
complementing the clear information on overall budget figures that is
already available on the internet. Apart from promoting transparency within a budget process
which is both highly technical and opaque, such an exercise – showing the “big picture” of
overall resource allocation policy and objectives – could facilitate parliament in engaging
more strongly on the macro/strategic as well as the micro/line-item elements of budgeting. 
ix) Capital budgeting in Germany is managed well, and the use of private financing
options conforms well with the OECD Principles on Public Governance of PPPs.
Germany
uses an iterative approach, whereby capital investment projects are subject to increasing
levels of scrutiny of their overall societal cost/benefit and various financing options. With
the active participation of parliament, political preferences are allowed to play an
appropriate role in project selection. Private financing of infrastructure is rightly perceived
as a method for procuring capital assets that should only be used when it represents value
for money, not as an alternative form of borrowing. The Federal Ministry of Finance’s
efforts to disseminate best practice on PPPs appear to be working well. There may be an
opportunity to strengthen the transparency of the various risks associated with large
infrastructure projects. Indeed, this effort may become even more important in the future
as the debt brake could make off-budget borrowing more attractive to sub-national
governments (see also xii below).
x) The marked autonomy of line ministries and executive agencies should be
matched with greater performance management capacity
to ensure that resources are

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being used effectively and efficiently. The routine “efficiency analyses” conducted within
ministries will need to be upgraded to provide meaningful, comparable information on
policy choices and prioritisation for policy-makers. The work of the Federal Court of
Auditors, which is the chief independent resource for identifying inefficiencies, should be
developed more systematically within the management information systems of ministries
and their agencies with a view to highlighting good and bad performance.