Pre-Budget Statement

The PBS presents the executive’s economic and fiscal policy plans for the forthcoming budget year and encourages debate on the budget in advance of the presentation of the more detailed Executive’s Budget Proposal. The Pre-Budget Statement reflects the culmination of the strategic planning phase of the budget process, in which the executive broadly aligns its policy goals with the resources available under the budget’s fiscal framework — the total amount of expenditure, revenue, and debt for the upcoming budget year. This process establishes the parameters of the budget proposal before detailed program funding decisions are made. By laying out the budget’s broad parameters, the statement can help create appropriate expectations for the Executive’s Budget Proposal. The Pre-Budget Statement can also be associated with a medium-term expenditure framework, which seeks to link policy, planning, and budgeting over a multi-year period. Best practice recommends that the Pre-Budget Statement include: macroeconomic forecasts upon which the budget will be based; major revenue and expenditure policies and priorities that will guide the development of detailed estimates for the upcoming budget; and multi-year revenue and expenditure projections

Assessing the public availability of the PBS
Publicly available budget documents are defined as those documents that are published on the website of the public authority issuing the document within the time frame specified in the OBS methodology and that all citizens are able to obtain free of charge. (See the Open Budget Survey Guidelines on Public Availability of Budget Documents.) This is a change from previous rounds of the Open Budget Survey: now at minimum documents must be made available on the Internet and free of charge to be considered publicly available.

The OBS methodology requires that for a PBS to be considered publicly available, it must be made available to the public one month before the Executive’s Budget Proposal is submitted to the legislature for consideration. If the PBS is not released to the public at least one month before the Executive’s Budget Proposal is submitted to the legislature for consideration, option “d” applies. Option “d” should also be chosen for documents that are produced for internal purposes only (that is, produced but never released to the public) or are not produced at all. Some governments may publish budget documents further in advance than the latest possible dates outlined above. In these instances, researchers should choose options “a” or “b,” depending on the date of publication identified for the PBS. See Question PBS-2 for more information.

Questions on the PBS in the OBS

 * Questions on the PBS in the OBS

1) The case of Chile in OBS 2019
In Chile in OBS 2019, the “Informe de Finanzas Públicas Proyecto de Ley de Presupuestos del Sector Público para el año 2019” has all the relevant information and could potentially be considered a PBS. However, it was released along with the EBP so if we considered it a PBS, it would have not been considered publicly available. On page 7, the document states that “El Informe de Finanzas Públicas que desde 2002 acompaña cada año al Proyecto de Ley de Presupuestos del Sector Público constituye un importante insumo para el proceso de discusión, tanto de parlamentarios como analistas, y también para la ciudadanía, debido a la pertinencia y oportunidad de la información que se entrega…” (google translate: “The Public Finance Report that since 2002 accompanies the Public Sector Budget Bill every year constitutes an important input for the discussion process, both for parliamentarians and analysts, and also for the citizens, due to the relevance and timeliness of the information that is delivered”). This line clarifies the purpose of the document, which alongside the fact that the document is submitted to the legislature along the EBP, clarifies that the Informe aims at informing the budget discussion in Congress, and not to guide the budget planning before the proposal is submitted to Congress. Hence, we chose not to consider it a PBS and instead chose to consider it as a supporting document to the EBP so we could assess it (it helped answer many of the EBP questions in Section 2). Note that this same document has been used in OBS 2015 and OBS 2017 as an EBP supporting document.

2) When the PBS is also a supporting document to the EBP
In Serbia in OBS 2019, there was a document published late that could be considered a PBS (“Fiscal Strategy for 2019 with Projections for 2020 and 2021”). In a statement from the Fiscal Council in Serbia, they frame the document as the initial step in the budget process (i.e., the intention of the document is a PBS) but in practice the document is published at the same time as the EBP. Should we consider this a PBS, published late, and not consider it with the EBP? Or should we consider it with the EBP and instead call it a PBS, “not produced at all”? In OBS 2017, we called this a late PBS and also considered it a supporting document to the EBP.

During our team discussion, we touched on the advocacy issue: If we consider this document as a PBS “published late”, the researcher can advocate to the government that this document needs to be published earlier.

On the flip side, since the document is published too late to be a PBS, the government is not actually using the document to set the budget parameters during formulation, meaning it could not be a PBS anyway.

Conclusion: We decided to treat this document as a supporting EBP document and add in the comments why we are doing this. We considered the PBS as not produced, and in the comments to the PBS questions note that this document has all the elements of a PBS but does not appear to be produced and used in the way.

As a side note, in terms of advocacy, the example of Turkey could help us. They publish the PBS, then they publish the same document (but updated) as a supporting document to the EBP.

3) What if COVID prevented the publication of the a key budget document?
Even if the COVID crisis prevented the publication of a key budget document, we are not considering it to be an exceptional circumstance because of which we could look back to assess the document from a previous fiscal year. Many governments worked hard to ensure publication of budget documents, even during the pandemic, though these documents were at times less comprehensive and timely than usual. We would not want to give credit to a country that did not publish a document during the pandemic while penalizing a country that did publish a document, just one that is less comprehensive. In addition, it is difficult to pinpoint when COVID prevented a document's publication. Finally, COVID impacted all countries in the survey, unlike the usual exceptions allowed in the survey (a one-time election in a country, for example).

Note: One country that is still under discussion is Canada. The Government of Canada was set to present their budget for 2020/21 budget in late March 2020, before it was postponed in mid-March because of the pandemic. It was pushed back a few times, before finally being postponed indefinitely in early May. This continued for the rest of 2020. Between 12 March 2020 and 30 December 2020 the Parliament passed 12 spending or tax bills. A number of these (if not a majority) are the legislation that we are considering Canada’s emergency fiscal policy package in the COVID Module. While there was no budget proposal for 2020/21, the Government did publish a Fall Economic Statement 2020 in November – this is the document that we will consider as the MYR for 2020/21 and the PBS for 2021/22. Canada also presented an “Economic and Fiscal Snapshot 2020” in July, which was a new document that focused on the Government’s fiscal response to COVID (and we use heavily in the COVID Module).

Because Canada's lack of publication of these budget documents was not a transparency issue but rather a calculated response to the pandemic - particularly in the case of the budget proposal - it is still under team discussion.

4) Can online transparency platforms be used to answer indicators for formulation/approval documents?
In OBS 2021 we encountered several countries that were using different types of portals to respond to questions of the PBS, EBP and, EB. Among these were: Ecuador, Argentina and, Mexico.

Argentina had used the Open Data Portal of the National Government in OBS 2019 under the criteria that it was mentioned in the Referral Message. However, in OBS 2021 said site was not mentioned in the bill or the referral message and therefore the researcher was not considering it to respond to questions.

Ecuador had used the Execution Portal for questions of the EBP, EB, IYR and, MYR under the criteria that the access was on the same page as the access to the EBP and EB.

For Mexico, the Budget Transparency Portal was created back in 2011 and is the result of joint work with different civil society and business organizations, including Fundar our OBS partner, to disseminate and make transparent information on the performance of the Pp using graphs, tables and, educational maps in a citizen language. Together with these organizations, we are working on a common agenda in terms of transparency, accountability and, a new strategy of informing citizens through the “Citizen Budget”. Mexico went through a process of legal reforms in transparency and the portal was accepted to be considered in the OBS under the agreement that it was established in the legal regulations.

The explanatory memorandum and the draft decree of expenditures used to make a more explicit reference that has changed over the years, case in point instead of a single general text, now different articles of the decree referred to the fact that the information must also be published on the portal, for example contracts, programs, information by gender. Also, the phrasing has changed from “Budget Transparency Portal” to “Electronic Transparency Portal”, also multiple references to publishing in “open data”.

According to the researcher Budget Transparency portal of the Ministry of Finance and Public Credit is a great advance in terms of access to public information. An effort promoted by the government (SHCP) and civil society, as highlighted in a press note on the 10th anniversary of this platform and its importance.

On Mexico see also The Road to Budget Transparency in Mexico.

In order to arrive at a uniform criterion that was consistent across countries, the decision that was agreed is that an explicit reference is required linking the documents to the portal. Being consistent with what we accept in different countries, it would be necessary:

1.	See an explicit reference to the platform in any of the other key budget documents (for example, if the EBP explicitly says: "Check the online platform for x, y, z". 2.	The purpose of the platform: that the information on the platform is published alongside these documents. (For example: Do not use performance reports to answer about formulation information).

In that sense, we decided to:

-	Not accept the Argentina portal this round, as the explicit reference was missing. -	Not accept the Ecuador portal this round to answer questions on the PBS, EBP and, EB, since having the two accesses (portal and documents) in the same webpage is not considered sufficient. That said the Execution portal is accepted to answer questions of the IYR and MYR. -	Accept the Mexico portal, given the long historic track, the diverse references to publishing the info in the “Electronic Transparency Portal” o in “open data”, the purpose and robustness of the portal.