Budget Tools: Financial Methods in the Public Sector

The thoroughly updated and expanded Second Edition of Greg G. Chen, Lynne A. Weikart, and Daniel W. Williams’ Budget Tools: Financial Methods in the Public Sector brings together scores of exercises that will take students through the process of public budgeting, from organizing data through analysis and presentation. This thoroughly revised text has been restructured – it now has 30 compact modules to focus on individual skills and enhance flexibility, and is reorganized to cover more straightforward skills early in the book and more complex tools later on. Using budgets from all levels of government as well as from nonprofit organizations, the authors give students the opportunity to work with real budgeting data to cover a range of topics and skills. Budget Tools provides instruction in the techniques and implementation of budgeting skills at a granular level to support a wide range of approaches to teaching the subject.

Greg G. Chen is associate professor at Baruch College School of Public Affairs, City University of New York. He was a manager of the budgeting and financial reporting department in the Ministry of Finance, and budget manager and senior policy adviser for the Premier’s Office of British Columbia, Canada, before taking his professorship in the United States. He had previously been an associate dean in the College of WISCO in China. Professor Chen conducts research and publishes papers in the areas of budgeting and financial management for nonprofit organizations and governments, program evaluation and cost-benefit analysis of diverse public programs, and comparisons of the health care systems and finance in Canada, the United States, and China.

Lynne A. Weikart was associate professor at Baruch College School of Public Affairs, City University of New York, until her retirement. She is currently a practitioner in residence at James Madison University, where she teaches budgeting and financial management. Before her academic career, she held several high-level government positions, including budget director of the Division of Special Education in New York City (NYC) public schools and executive deputy commissioner of the New York State Division of Human Rights. For several years, she also served as the executive director of a nonprofit, City Project, a progressive fiscal think tank focused on reforming NYC’s resource allocation patterns. Weikart’s current research focuses on resource allocation in urban areas as well as on urban finance, and she has published many articles on these subjects. She is author of Follow the Money: Who Controls New York City Mayors? (2009) and the coauthor with Greg Chen of Budgeting and Financial Management for Nonprofits (2012). The latter was CQ Press. She won the Luther Gulick Award for Outstanding Academic from the New York Metropolitan Chapter of the American Society for Public Administration in 2001.

Daniel W. Williams has taught budgeting at Baruch College since 1995. His research includes budgeting, forecasting and the history of public administration. Before his academic career, Williams spent nineteen years with the Virginia Medicaid program, including nine years as the Budget Director of the Virginia Department of Medical Assistance Services. For five years he served on a local Community Board in Manhattan, where he was for three years the chair of the budget committee. He has received the Abraham J. Briloff Prize in Ethics, Baruch College, and the Outstanding Paper Award 2002-2003, International Journal of Forecasting (with Don Miller).