Executive's Budget Proposal

The Executive’s Budget Proposal is the government’s major statement on fiscal issues for the budget year that is about to begin. This document includes detailed revenue, expenditure, and debt estimates; macroeconomic assumptions, historical and multi-year budget data; and public policy information. The EBP is one of the most important policy documents that a country issues each year, for it is through the budget that governments translate many of their key policy goals into action. The nature of the Executive’s Budget Proposal can vary from country to country; sometimes it is a single document, and sometimes it is a collection of multiple documents. It is important that the Executive’s Budget Proposal is transparent because its proposals determine revenues (how much citizens pay in taxes), expenditures (how government resources are distributed among citizens), and debt (how much of the cost of government is borne by current or future generations). To allow for an informed public and legislative discussion on the budget, best practice calls for the executive to provide a full explanation of its taxation, spending, and borrowing plans well in advance of its enactment.

Assessing the public availability of the EBP
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 an EBP to be considered publicly available, it must be made available to the public while the legislature is still considering it and before the legislature approves (enacts) it. If the EBP is not released to the public before the legislature approves (enacts) it, 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 EBP.

The OBS definition of an Executive’s Budget Proposal is a document(s) that (i) the executive submits to the legislature as a formal part of the budget approval process and (ii) the legislature either approves or on which it approves proposed amendments. The OBS will treat the Executive’s Budget Proposal as “Not Produced,” in the following cases:
 * The executive does not submit the draft budget to the legislature; or
 * The legislature receives the draft budget but does not approve it or does not approve recommendations on the draft budget;
 * The legislature rejects the draft budget submitted by the executive, but the executive implements it without legislative approval; or
 * There is no legislature, or the legislature has been dissolved.

See Question EBP-2 for more information.

Questions in the OBS on the EBP

 * Questions on the EBP in the OBS

1) What counts as an EBP?
1. A document that qualifies as an EBP should include information on total revenues, total expenditures, and the deficit for the budget year

2. The document should also include information for the budget year presented by administrative, functional, or economic classification in a table format

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) Can we accept information in the citizen version of the EBP, which is not in the main document?
In OBS 2019, South Korea published an EBP, and at the same time, published a citizens version of the EBP that has additional information on the macroeconomic forecast that is not in the EBP or supporting documents (Note that this CB is tabled in parliament along with the EBP.). In OBS 2017 and 2019, this information is accepted for the macroeconomic questions in Section 2, treating the citizen’s budget as a supporting EBP document.

4) Can we accept budget documents that are published near the same time as the main EBP documentation, but posted separately from the rest of the EBP?
In some cases we have accepted budget documents as supporting documents to the EBP, even when they are published separately from the main EBP documents. In these cases, the documents are clearly linked to the budget proposal, but may be produced by a different department. See examples below from Japan, South Korea and Canada.

In Japan in OBS 2019, there is a document released in January 2018 (same month as the EBP), which shows a sensitivity analysis and revenue projections until BY+2 based on the 2018 budget. It is a page on the MoF’s website under “Budget Topics” but not posted on the EBP supporting documents webpage. See the translated version here.

In South Korea in OBS 2019, there is a ‘National tax revenue budget for 2019’ that is published on the same day as the EBP as a Press Release on the MoEF’s website, but is not posted on the Open Budgets portal or the Draft Laws website where the other EBP documents are posted. See this link.

In Canada, the Budget and Main Estimates are published separately, and by different agencies. In both OBS 2017 and OBS 2019, we treated both documents as part of the EBP. Budget 2018 was published online on February 27, 2018 as soon as the Minister began his speech in the House of Commons. The Main Estimates are a supporting document of the EBP tabled separately. For the 2018 Budget, the Main Estimates were made available April 16, 2018.

4) 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.

5) 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.