Abstract:

Education is important for every country, because it provides basic knowledge to children and underpins their subsequent professional growth. The skills level of the workforce is crucial for socio-economic development of the country.

The effectiveness of the education system depends on many factors. The most important among them are the amounts of financing and their rational allocation among federal, regional and local levels of authority.

The authors have conducted a comparative analysis of the education system funding in Russia and abroad, correlation and regression analysis of the main financial provision indicators in Russia over the past 10 years, as well as analyzed the implementation effectiveness of federal programs in the field of education. The results obtained revealed a number of problems, including:
• the lagging share of education expenditures in the total volume of expenditures in Russia in comparison with more developed countries;
• the lack of systematic spending on education at all levels of budgets;
• the trend towards transferring responsibility for education development to the regional level coupled with stagnating share of education expenditures in the regional budgets of Russia;
• discrepancy between the goals and objectives of the federal program “Development of Education”, the national project “Education” and budget classification, which prohibits funds allocation to a desired task, control over their allocation, and estimation of rationality of their use.

The conducted analysis of the experience in public finances management in different areas of economy both in Russia and abroad allows the authors to justify proposals aimed at solving the aforementioned problems.

These proposals include:
• gradual increase in the share of education expenditure in the consolidated budget of Russia;
• Improving the rationality of the education expenditure distribution between federal, regional and local budgets; assigning the responsibility for higher education to the federal level of authority, for technical-vocational education – to the regional level, and for primary education – to the local level of authority;
• alignment of expenses on education from all three levels of budgets and the real load on each level according to the number of students and standards of expenses per student;
• orientation on the final result by adjusting the budget classification, which allows to allocate funds for desired task of a specific program and project.

Thus, in the study the authors have identified significant potential for improving the financing of education in Russia and justified the directions for its utilization.

Keywords:

Funding education expenditure, federal program “Development of Education, national project “Education”.