Budget Credibility: What Can We Learn from Budget Execution Reports?
- Zac Mills
- Jul 2018
- International Budget Partnership (IBP)
- International
Budget execution reports are meant to provide a detailed report to citizens about how their government collected revenue, spent money and incurred debt within a given time period. One important means to convey this information is the provision of detailed budget data, such as expenditure and revenue actuals against the original budgeted and forecasted amounts. This comparison allows one to understand whether the budget was implemented as planned or if there were unforeseen deviations from forecasted revenue or appropriated expenditure. To this end, this paper investigates whether the execution rate data is consistently reported, in what classification format, at what level of detail, and at what level of disaggregation for the Year-end Report (YER), the Mid-Year Review (MYR) and the In-Year Reports (IYR) for a sample set of countries. Furthermore, it seeks to document which countries provided a meaningful analysis of the deviations in expenditure as presented in these budget reports.
