What will public finance look like in the year 2040? This publication presents four stories that imagine the role of fiscal transparency and accountability two decades from now.
Jul 26, 2019
This edition of Metro Budget Notes reviews the South African Auditor General’s findings on local governments for 2017/18 from the perspective of informal settlement residents in metropolitan municipalities.
By Jul 12, 2019
As countries increasingly focus on meeting the SDGs, attention should be paid not only to the financing gap governments face but also to the “credibility” of their budgets – which measures governments’ capacity to effectively manage and spend the resources that they already have (or say they have). New IBP analysis using the World Bank BOOST dataset suggests that the lack of budget credibility is an important challenge that may undermine the pursuit of the SDGs in many countries.
By Jun 10, 2019
Across Latin America, tax expenditures are reducing government revenues by between 10 and 20 percent, but adequate information on their objectives, beneficiaries, and ultimate impact is lacking.
By May 21, 2019
How can we build a moral case for equitable budgets and redistributive policies that will resonate with a broad cross-section of society? This reflective piece points to the need to collect more evidence on attitudes about fairness across countries and communities and to fashion messages that emphasize our common humanity, rather than our differences.
Apr 26, 2019
This edition of Metro Budget Notes discusses important changes in South African national government grants to metropolitan municipalities that could increase the amount of funding available for upgrading of informal settlements and make it easier to track spending of such funds.
By Apr 04, 2019
This guide — part of a series of guides on how to read and understand different budget documents at the national and county level in Kenya — provides some structured questions that will help the public, civil society organizations, and other agencies read and understand Kenya county Audit Reports.
By Apr 01, 2019
As part of the International Budget Partnership’s Assessing Budget Credibility Project, 24 civil society partners in 23 countries identified a budget credibility challenge in their country and scrutinized a case where the government consistently failed to raise or spend funds as it said it would at the start of the fiscal year. Partners looked for explanations for deviations in published documents and then sought interviews with public officials to further understand the deviations. These budget credibility country snapshot reports summarize their research.
By Mar 21, 2019
Nigeria has long had severe budget credibility issues, and recent evidence suggests that the problem has not improved. This paper probes the various factors that that may be contributing to the low credibility of the budget in Nigeria and presents an analysis structured around an assessment of eight different hypotheses for what could be driving the problem.
By Mar 07, 2019
This report summarizes budget credibility research undertaken in partnership with 24 civil society organizations in 23 countries between October 2018 and January 2019. Each partner organization identified a budget credibility challenge in their country and scrutinized a case where the government consistently failed to raise or spend funds as it said it would at the start of the fiscal year.
By Feb 21, 2019
This paper looks at the information governments provide on the impact of their budget policies on poor and disadvantaged groups – and on poverty and inequality more generally. The analysis is based on the results of three questions from the Open Budget Survey 2017 meant to hone in on these issues. Findings demonstrate that, on average, governments publish very little information on these topics, thereby limiting the ability of civil society to monitor these efforts and hold their governments accountable.
