EBP-1a

What is the fiscal year of the EBP evaluated in this Open Budget Survey questionnaire?

Guidelines
Please enter the fiscal year in the following format: “FY YYYY” or “FY YYYY-YY.”

Internal Guidance
In OBS 2021, we had a question from Jordan on what fiscal year EBP to assess. Jordan held parliamentary elections on November 10, 2020 and the draft 2021 budget was published online on November 30, 2020. Normally in Jordan, the draft budget is submitted to parliament in early December but given the elections, there was a government reshuffle on December 12, 2020 and the new government got the vote of confidence on January 2, 2021 (note that the government cannot submit any new law to parliament before the vote of confidence).

On January 4, 2021, the new government submitted the EBP (as published one November 30 by the previous government), to parliament. The budget speech 2021 was given at the time of submission, so could not be used for the purposes of the survey.

It initially seemed to make sense to use the draft budget for 2021, because it was published before our cutoff date. However, that would mean we could not use the budget speech to answer questions in the survey, which, in OBS 2019, answered a number of questions. Thus, it would seem that we we were docking Jordan even though from a transparency standpoint, they had not lowered their practice (the budget speech just happened to fall just after the cutoff date).

Given that the FY 2021 EBP was tabled in parliament after the research cut-off date, and that the package in full (meaning, including the budget speech) was not published until then, we are using the FY2020 draft budget in this assessment.