MR SHAPIRO: I'll try to be
very brief here, in part because some of you are already quite familiar with the
International Budget Partnership.
The International Budget Partnership is housed at the Center
on Budget and Policy Priorities. The Center began in 1981 in the wake of sweeping cuts
to low income programmes that were adopted in the United States in the context of little
budgetary debate. In the 1980s I would say about 80% of the Center's work was focussed at
the national level. Increasingly, though, with the devolution in the United States of
responsibilities to the state level, we became more and more focussed on the state level.
At this point in time, about half our work is at the national level and half is at the
state level.
In the early 1990s and as part of this trend towards more work being done at the state
level, a State Fiscal Project was created at the Center that Iris Lav started up, with the
Ford Foundation a main funder. The intent behind this project was to act as a resource
base for, to facilitate communication among, and nurture the development of state
organisations in the U.S. to undertake budget analysis with a particular focus on the
effects of budget policies on the poor. Just as we are recognising now the sweeping
development of more and more people doing budget analysis in countries around the world,
in the U.S. that same pattern manifested itself in the 1990s where all around the U.S.
more and more state groups began this type of work.
Because of our experience with the State Fiscal Project, the Ford Foundation asked the
Center to form an International Budget Partnership. The first major activity that many of you
participated in was the Washington, D.C. Conference two Decembers ago. Just as one sign of
the growth of this activity, at the last conference we had sixteen countries represented,
and 50 attendees. This year, with actually not much effort to get more people, we had 24
countries represented and 80 attendees. That's a 50% to 60% growth rate.
In substantial part reflecting the suggestions that were put forward at the last
conference, our activities fall in four areas. First we try to act as a resource base and
facilitate communication among groups around the world doing this type of work. I would
say this is our number one purpose. It's really at the heart of what we do and it's at the
heart of what folks at the last conference thought we should try to do. We've begun to
collect information on a wide range of issues and we put much of that information on the
web site. The reason that we have repeatedly brought up our web site here is because it is
our on-line collection of resources. We know that it's not easy for many of you to access
the web easily, or at least rapidly, but the web site is a source of information that's
out there and that is useable, maybe with some difficulty, around the world 24 hours a
day.
The second major activity of our work is the development and dissemination of model
reports. In a lot of cases, what we're trying to do here is to find model reports that
have been done in other countries and make sure that researchers in still other countries
are familiar with them. Take for example the women's budget that Idasa has put together:
over the past year we've gotten 20 or so requests from individuals around the world asking
about women budgets reports. We haven't done such a report, but we can point towards the
Idasa report. What we hope to do is collect information about the reports that all of you
are doing so we can share that information with other researchers. Also in this area,
we're participating in joint reports, two of which we've discussed (the two we've done so
far) during this conference. These joint reports attempt to fill niches where there seems
to be needed research that would be of general interest around the world.
The third area of activities has to do with technical assistance. This technical
assistance can occur through on site visits, it can occur through reviewing materials and
the exchange of information via E-mail, or it can occur through other mechanisms. For some
groups it has included visits to the Center. These included information visits as well as
some extended visits. I should also say in this area, when we talk about technical
assistance, the idea here again is not necessarily that the Center is providing technical
assistance. In a lot of cases the technical assistance is really trying to facilitate
communication among the groups. For example, the paper that Joachim presented yesterday on
the amendment powers within legislatures around the world mentioned four countries that
they studied in particular. One of the countries was India, and he spent a lot of time in
preparing that report with the various representatives from India who were at the first
conference, and that exchange of information was one thing that helped him to pull the
report together.
That actually closely links to the last thing I'll talk about that the project does,
and that's networking activities. Almost all the previous areas of activities in a way are
networking activities, providing technical assistance at some levels is a form of
networking activity. The conference itself, it's a networking activity but it's also an
activity in which everyone can provide technical assistance to each other.
Let me just close with a bit on staffing, so people can get a little sense of what we
might be able to provide. There are two people who work full time on the international
project. I'm one of them, the other individual is Stefan Falk. There are three people at
the Center who spend a considerable part of their time on the project but the majority of
their time on other projects. They are Iris Lav, who is the deputy director of the Center,
and also oversees all our state programs at the Center; Michelle Bazie, who is our
communications and web site specialist; and Ellen Nissenbaum, our legislative director at
the Center. The Center staff itself has 60 people and consists mostly of people who either
work on budget policies directly or who work on programme analysis related to poverty
programmes. So from time to time, if people have questions, I have a lot of resources that
I can put people into touch with, with Center staff, with the Center network within
Washington or in a lot of cases, since we know so many of the state groups, those are the
folks that we try to help link people up with.
