An understanding of social budget and its role in enabling income distrubition: An analysis of Turkey

Social budget is a budgeting method that aims to increase people's life quality with social public income and expenses. This type of budgeting consists of two aspects. Firstly, it is a social accounting system that is composed of social expenses and social public income. Secondly, it is a medium term plan used in social justice, social integration, fight against unemployment, enabling fair income distribution, increasing the quality of life and fight against poverty. Within the concept of social budgeting, there exists social welfare, human capital, education, social security, social capital, sheltering, sustainable environment, health, employment, recreation, religion and culture. Social budgeting has two aspects; namely income and expenses. The income section of a social budget consists of social public incomes. A fair taxation system, informal economy and taxation expenses affect the collection of social public incomes. Social expenses, on the other hand, consist of expenses regarding education, health, social security and employment. While the theoretical foundation of social budget is based on the life quality, the implementation aspect consists of social welfare state. Gender responsive budgeting, participatory budgeting and child-directed budgeting can be listed to be among the social budgeting approaches. Fair distribution of incomes means that the shares of production factors allocated from national income are equitable. Enabling fair income distribution is one of the macro economic aims of the states. The social budget is the most significant tool for fulfilling this aim. In the first section in this study, the concepts of income distribution and its theoretical framework are explained. The theoretical, conceptual and implementation aspects of the social budget are elaborated in the second section. In the final section of the study, social and economic progress of social budget approach in Turkey and its effects on fair income distribution are comparatively evaluated with the selected countries. Keywords: Social Budget, Social Expenses, İncome Distribution, Fair İncome Distribution.