Increasing pressure on public finances, combined with demands for greater accountability and transparency, has made the effectiveness of budget programmes a central concern of contemporary public administration. The programme-target method is intended to connect budget decisions more closely with public-policy objectives, although its practical application has produced uneven results under different institutional conditions. This study examines the operation of the programme-target method as a managerial mechanism and considers the reported effectiveness of selected public programmes in relation to expenditure planning, performance information, and the wider administrative environment. The stated empirical basis is a comparative assessment of 30 programmes in Ukraine, Poland, and Germany, covering social protection, health care, and education during 2020–2025. The analysis combines a composite efficiency index, produced by normalising and aggregating performance and expenditure-deviation indicators, with descriptive statistics, the Shapiro–Wilk normality test, one-way analysis of variance, and the Kruskal–Wallis test. The reported findings show descriptive variation among programmes and countries, with statistical differences between groups constructed from predetermined efficiency-index ranges (p < 0.05). Higher index values reflect more favourable combinations of target achievement and expenditure deviation, whereas lower values describe greater discrepancies between programme plans and their reported implementation. The results are compatible with the argument that effective monitoring, clear programme objectives, reliable performance information, and administrative capacity are important for public-budget management. However, because the groups compared statistically were defined using the same index analysed in those tests, the significance findings cannot independently demonstrate the effect of institutional capacity or the efficacy of programme-target budgeting. In addition, the reported data do not establish that funding volume is unrelated to performance, and some summary figures require reconciliation with the original observations. The article therefore interprets the comparison as exploratory evidence rather than definitive causal proof. Its contribution is to develop a management-oriented perspective on programme budgeting and to identify priorities for stronger monitoring, transparent indicator definitions, reliable cross-country comparisons, and the systematic incorporation of evaluation results into public decision-making. These improvements offer a practical agenda for strengthening public financial governance when supported by reproducible programme-level evidence.
