Budget Year

a legally established yearly period in which the budget is drawn up, approved, and realized. In most countries, the budget year corresponds to the calendar year (the USSR and other socialist countries, France, Italy, West Germany, Brazil, Southern Rhodesia, Mexico, Argentina, Indonesia, and others). In several other countries, the budget year takes in the period of activity from July 1 to June 30 (USA, Sweden, Norway, the Arab Republic of Egypt, the Sudan, and Kenya); in others, from April 1 to March 31 (Great Britain, Japan, India, Denmark, Canada, the Republic of South Africa, Nigeria, and others). In such countries as Burma, Ceylon, and Thailand, the budget year begins October 1 and continues to September 30, whereas in Turkey the budget is drawn up and implemented for a budgetary period of March 1 to February 28. In many of the countries a change to the calendar budget year is contemplated. The correspondence of the budget year to the calendar year substantially facilitates the task of preparing economic prognoses related to the income and expenditure of the state budgets of various countries.

In the USSR in the first years of Soviet power, semiannual budgets were drawn up. Starting in 1920, the budgets were approved for a year (January 1 to December 31). Because of the dependence of the budget on the results of agricultural production, which at that time was the product of a dismembered peasant economy, and also because of the inadequate level of planning of the people’s economy, it became essential to orient the budget year (like all systems of productive and financial planning) to the period from October 1 to September 30. The success achieved in the industrialization of the country, the collectivization of agriculture, and the strengthening of sovkhoz production, as well as the growth in the role of the planning principle in all aspects of the people’s economy, created the prerequisites for the change to a calendar budget year in 1931.