【正文】 reparation of the draft budget and the parliamentary approval process. He concludes that the positive impact of more stringent budget institutions on deficit and debt hold for these countries as well. Yl228。outinen (2020), also studying Central and Eastern European countries, includes criteria on the decision making sequence in budget preparation and the order of the approval procedure in parliament, thus confirming earlier results. Against these studies stands Perotti and Kontopoulos (2020) who construct an index of the procedural fragmentation of the budget process, broadly corresponding to a topdown and a bottomup preparation process. Although they demonstrate that a lower level of fragmentation (., a more topdown oriented process) is associated with a lower deficit, lower expenditure and lower revenue, the relationship is found to be weak. While supportive of the hypothesis that topdown budgeting is conducive to aggregate fiscal discipline, there are some limitations to these studies, however. First, the studies construct posite indices, consisting of several institutional aspects, and test their relationship with fiscal performance to arrive at these results. It is, therefore, not possible to separate out the contribution of the topdown procedure. Second, as discussed above, it is in practice a matter of interpretation of defining a budget process as being predominantly topdown or bottom up. The dividing line may be drawn differently by different studies. Third, these studies have to rely on formal institutions, while the budget process in reality may well be governed by a multitude of informal practices. Ehrhart et al. (2020) take a different approach when testing the impact that the sequence of decisions have on the oute of a budget process. In a series of controlled laboratory trials, they demonstrate that the size of the budget is indeed affected by changing from a bottomup to a topdown decisionmaking procedure, but that there is no general tendency for a top down procedure to produce a smaller budget. Strictly speaking, the objective of the budget process is to avoid excessive deficits and ensure a sustainable fiscal position, rather than minimize spending levels. The result is, therefore, neither an argument for, nor an argument against, topdown budgeting. However, a second result of the study is that plexity is costly, and that an increase of the number of spending dimensions (., more budget items)— and less information, require more voting rounds to reach an equilibrium. As argued above, with a budget consisting of a large number of appropriations, a process where information gathering has an opportunity cost, and where there is a set deadline for submitting and passing the budget, a topdown approach has a higher chance of leading to a fiscally sustainable budget. A topdown approach to the preparation of the budget requires procedures for establishing the aggregate expenditure level and the sectoral allocation of the budget. It also changes the focus and dynamics of the negotiations between the ministry of finance and line ministries. A stylized characterization of the budget process is valuable for analyzing factors that are relevant for how government finances evolve over time. The use of such abstractions of reality should not lose sight of the fact that budgets are shaped in a highly political environment, where there is often pressure to deviate from what is optimal from a collective point of view. Therefore, when designing the institutional framework it bees necessary to