What are the top 4 items that a majority of the state budget is used for?

Budget planning and preparation are (or should be) at the heart of good public expenditure management. To be fully effective, public expenditure management systems require four forms of fiscal and financial discipline:

control of aggregate expenditure to ensure affordability; that is, consistency with the macroeconomic constraints;

effective means for achieving a resource allocation that reflects expenditure policy priorities;

efficient delivery of public services (productive efficiency); and

minimization of the financial costs of budgetary management (i. e., efficient budget execution and cash and debt management practices).

Budget preparation is the principal mechanism for achieving items (1) and (2); item (3) typically features as an element of budget preparation only in industrial countries, while item (4) is essentially an issue in budget execution and cash management (see Sections 4 and 5). Moreover, no system of budget execution or cash planning (the subjects of Sections 4 and 5) can do more than mitigate the problems caused by poor quality or unrealistic budget preparation.