参考答案：No longer a place for incremental budgetingThe view that there is no longer a place for incremental budgeting in any organisation is a rather extreme view. It is known for encouraging slack and wasteful spending, hence the comment that it is particularly unsuitable for public sector organisations, where cash cutbacks are being made. However, to say that there is no place for it at all is to ignore the drawbacks of zero-based budgeting. These should not be ignored as they can make ZBB implausible in some organisationsor departments. They are as follows:– Departmental managers will not have the skills necessary to construct decision packages. They will need training for this and training takes time and money.– In a large organisation, the number of activities will be so large that the amount of paperwork generated from ZBB will be unmanageable. – Ranking the packages can be difficult, since many activities cannot be compared on the basis of purely quantitative measures. Qualitative factors need to be incorporated but this is difficult.– The process of identifying decision packages, determining their purpose, costs and benefits is massively time consuming and therefore costly.– Since decisions are made at budget time, managers may feel unable to react to changes that occur during the year. This could have a detrimental effect on the business if it fails to react to emerging opportunities and threats.It could be argued that ZBB is more suitable for public sector than for private sector organisations. This is because, firstly, it is far easier to put activities into decision packages in organisations which undertake set definable activities. Local government, for example, have set activities including the provision of housing, schools and local transport. Secondly, it is far more suited to costs that are discretionary in nature or for support activities. Such costs can be found mostly in not for profit organisations or the public sector, or in the service department of commercial operations.Since ZBB requires all costs to be justified, it would seem inappropriate to use it for the entire budgeting process in a commercial organisation. Why take so much time and resources justifying costs that must be incurred in order to meet basic production needs It makes no sense to use such a long-winded process for costs where no discretion can be exercised anyway. Incremental budgeting is, by its nature, quick and easy to do and easily understood. These factors should not beignored.In conclusion, whilst ZBB is more suited to public sector organisations, and is more likely to make cost savings in hard times such as these, its drawbacks should not be overlooked.