public expenditure tracking survey

Last week the International Budget Partnership (IBP) released its 2008 version of the Open Budget Index (OBI), which analyzes budget transparency in 85 countries all around the world.   Among its main findings, the OBI shows that the level of transparency in the budgetary process is deporable in most of the evaluated countries -only 5 percent of them provide adequate information on spending to the public, while almost 30 percent of them provide very few or any information at all.

Although a group of countries are moving forward on this matter, the current state of budget transparency opens the door to waste and misappropriation of public funds in most places.   This situation is and will always be delicate, but in this time of expansionary and stimulus policies, an appropriate disclosure of the use of resources becomes very sensitive.