BUDGET MANAGEMENT OF MUNICIPALITIES IN THE SLOVAK REPUBLIC AND THE CONDITIONS OF ITS PLANNING

The present contribution deals with the problem of financial management and the development and changes in the conditions under which the slovak municipalities plan their economy. It aims description and quantification of the financial management of municipalities in the Slovak Republic in the period 2000 to 2010 followed by the identification of trends in selected components of financial management, as well as the overall management of municipalities and specification of conditions and changes in the planning of revenues and expenses during the period. When processing the present paper, we mainly used the method of analysis, synthesis and comparison of available statistical data on financial management of municipalities in the Slovak Republic, descriptive methods, by specifying legal conditions and changes in the budgetary management, mathematical and statistical methods in quantifying the financial management and identifying trends of certain components of revenues and expenses, as well as abstraction, induction and deduction methods. The time period from 2000 to 2010 was chosen for two reasons. First reason, it is the realization of several phases of public administration reform in Slovakia, as well as because of the negative impact of the economic crisis on the budget (mainly tax) incomes of villages and towns. For above 11 years, the conditions for financial planning and management fundamentally changed. Their volume and structure are mainly related to the transition of many competencies from government to local and regional authorities. The problem was late fiscal decentralization, but also to the persistent underfunding transferred state administration to municipalities is forced to bring in their own resources. Despite a number of negative effects is evident from the analysis that the total revenues and costs of local governments in the Slovak Republic are growing in absolute terms, slightly increasing the relative share of investment spending. At the same time, we found that current incomes stagnate, slightly decreasing and increases the share of income of a capital nature, it can mean both increasing loan burden, respectively, sale of property, from which income is disposable and never to be repeated in the future. These facts are a challenge for further investigation. We could not analyze them, because of limited extent of the contribution.