Citizens Budget

A Citizens Budget is a nontechnical presentation of an Executive’s Budget Proposal or an Enacted Budget. It can take many forms, but its distinguishing feature is that it is designed to reach and be understood by as large a segment of the population as possible. It is designed to present key public finance information to a general audience. It is typically written in accessible language and incorporates visual elements to help non-specialist readers understand the information. While each key document in the budget cycle can and should be presented in a way that the public can understand, a Citizens Budget refers specifically to a citizens version of the Executive Budget Proposal and the Enacted Budget. You can read more and find examples here.

Assessing the public availability of the CB
If more than one Citizens Budget is produced, please complete this question for one of them, specifying in the comment box below which document (Executive’s Budget Proposal or Enacted Budget) you are referring to, and – in the same comment box – which other Citizens Budget is produced and its public availability status.

Remember that 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 by the OBS methodology and that all citizens are able to obtain free of charge. 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.

Option “a” applies if the document is produced and made available to the public online but not within the time frame specified in the OBS methodology Option “b” applies if the document is produced and made available to the public within the time frame specified by the OBS methodology but only in hard copy (and is not available online). Option “b” also applies if the document is made available to the public within the time frame specified by the OBS methodology in soft electronic copy but is not available online. Option “c” applies if the document is produced for internal purposes only and so is not made available to the public. Option “d” applies if the document is not produced at all. Option “e” applies if the document is publicly available. See Question CB-2a for more information.

Questions on the PBS in the OBS

 * Questions on the CB in the OBS

1) What counts as a CB?
Can we consider documents produced by agencies other than the Ministry of Finance?

In China in OBS 2019, a Citizens Budget was produced by the Xinhua News Agency, a state media outlet, and then republished in full on the Ministry of Finance’s website with a byline noting that the source of the budget summary was Xinhuanet (the online arm of Xinhua news). In OBS 2017, this document had not been considered as a citizens budget because it was not produced by the government, but only republished from a news agency. However, in OBS 2019, the document will now be accepted, recognizing that Xinhua is a ministry-level institution in the Chinese central government. While the researcher disagreed with this approach, noting that the document should be produced and published formally by the Ministry of Finance, IBP added a clarification note explaining that this document would be accepted in OBS 2019 to be consistent with other countries where a ministry of communications or information produces a citizens budget.

2) 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.