Open Budget Survey 2023 published (29 May 2024)

Link: https://internationalbudget.org/open-budget-survey/open-budget-survey-2023 

Abstract from IBP website:

The Open Budget Survey is the world’s only comparative, independent, and regular assessment of transparency, oversight and participation in national budgets.

This locally-led process was conducted with in-country researchers, peer reviewers, and government reviewers who completed 30,000 indicators across all surveyed countries, assessing 672 publicly available budget documents and 299 participation mechanisms.

This latest round comes at a turbulent time of unprecedented challenges. Rising debt, inflation, conflicts, closing civic space and climate change have led to serious setbacks for many. Structural inequality is undermining the promise of democracy to deliver for all. Given these challenges, the budgetary process provides countless opportunities for governments to share information about public resource decisions they are making and their rationale, and to seek community generated evidence that can help them make better decisions that reflect people’s priorities.

Global budget transparency has increased by 24% since 2008, but it is still well below what is considered sufficient (a score at or above 61 out of 100) to allow for meaningful public engagement. Legislative oversight is also well below sufficient levels, and public participation is rare. Average audit oversight scores are sufficient, but challenges remain to ensure governments follow up on audit reports.

Despite modest gains in global budget transparency, regional trends show two stories - one of sustained progress and one of downward peril.

Since 2012, East Asia & the Pacific and Sub-Saharan Africa have had the steepest increases over time. Their progress, along with that of Eastern Europe & Central Asia and Latin America & the Caribbean, contrast with a significant fall over time in South Asia, stagnation in Western Europe, U.S., & Canada, and continued low performance in the Middle East & North Africa (albeit with improvements). 

Major conflicts and other factors contributed to drops in the publication of two key documents - Citizens Budgets and In-Year Reports.

Citizen Budgets are a great way to produce a more accessible version of the budget that everyday people can engage with. In-Year Reports are a perfect opportunity to assess whether countries are underspending or overspending compared to their initial budgets on social programs and other sectors that are important to communities. The decline in both of these practices is important given the critical role these two documents can play in promoting meaningful public engagement in the budget process. Countries also continue to do a much better job at presenting information in their budget proposal stage, than in documents later in the process that would allow for greater scrutiny of how they’re doing on actual spending.

We also continue to see scarce information on how governments are raising revenues and managing debt—two key areas that impact whether governments have the necessary resources to deliver on social spending.

Although a large majority of countries (70%) provide data on all projected tax revenue by individual source in their Executive’s Budget Proposal, only 59% provide data on all actual revenue collected by individual source. About half of surveyed countries provide data in their budget proposals on their total debt burden. Less than a quarter offer information on the long-term sustainability of government finances.

Even fewer countries—11 percent of those assessed—include in their Executive Budget Proposal a longer-term projection of financial sustainability that covers a period of at least 10 years, including macroeconomic and demographic assumptions. 

Despite these setbacks, there are bright spots of reform champions who are presenting meaningful budgetary information to their publics.