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