The Road to Budget Transparency Learning from Country Experience
- Alta Folscher & Paolo de Renzio
- Nov 2017
- International Budget Partnership (IBP)
- International
Budget transparency — the public availability of comprehensive and timely information about public finances — is a key precondition for ensuring government accountability. Providing public access to sufficient budget information enables citizens and civil society groups to understand how governments collect and spend revenues, thereby enabling monitoring and advocacy. According to the International Budget Partnership’s (IBP) Open Budget Survey, only a limited number of countries provide access to budget information that is sufficient for these purposes. Many countries have improved their levels of transparency, but seem to have got stuck in the middle ranks of the Open Budget Index. Why is that? What have those governments that managed to break through the middle ranks done to guarantee that their citizens have access to adequate amounts of budget information?
