Opening Budgets to Public Understanding and Debate: Results from 36 Countries

The International Budget Project (IBP), an Open Society Foundations grantee, has released a study, Opening Budgets to Public Understanding and Debate: Results from 36 Countries. It is based on responses by civil society organizations to the Open Budget Questionnaire, which IBP developed to evaluate public access to budget information and the openness of the budget process.

The study's findings include the following:

• Surveyed countries fared best with regard to the executive budget proposal. Documents related to the executive budget are routinely released to the public and typically contain significant amounts of information.
• Far fewer countries demonstrate positive practices in issuing public reports that monitor the budget while it is being implemented or that evaluate the budget at the end of the fiscal year.
• The weakest results concern executive efforts to facilitate public understanding of and discourse about the budget. In addition, official avenues for legislative and public input in the budget process tend to be lacking.

A number of countries—such as Slovenia and South Africa—have been able to develop open budget systems in a relatively short period of time, indicating that progress on these matters is feasible. Indeed, many countries could make substantial additional progress with little effort, such as by making public some of the budget documents that the executive currently produces for internal purposes. That simple step would significantly increase the openness of budget processes in many countries.