Abstract
While academic literature has extensively discussed country practices and the challenges involved in performance based budgeting, Sub national governments with extensive responsibilities in delivering public services and closer to the grassroots are sparsely discussed. This paper addresses this gap in literature. Performance budgeting approach of two fiscally pro active sub- national governments in the emerging economies of India and China is the focus of this paper. The paper tries to understand the performance budgeting initiatives, processes and the achievements in a comparative perspective. Mutual lessons to be drawn to enhance the value of performance budgeting are discussed. The paper uses the existing evidence from review of literature for China while that for India is based on a case study of Karnataka by the author.