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Democratizing Debate on Development
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7 February 2009 Some Pertinent Issues related to OBI Methodology
There is hardly any disagreement over the fact that public finance in general and budgets in particular are tools of economic governance and like any other tool of governance, it is not free from the dynamics of the political system that operates at the helm of affairs in governance. Since political systems across the world are not homogeneous, the budgets of different nations are only expected to differ from each other in their form, scale, levels and use as a tool of governance. Under such a scenario, where various political systems dictate diverse budget processes, it is extremely difficult to compare and rank these processes on a single indicator that can be fit for all countries. Given this huge limitation, the methodology adopted by OBI not only successfully ranks countries as per the level of openness of their budgets, it has reasonably achieved its goal of creating awareness around budgets and highlight some major gaps in the national budgeting processes. No wonder, the OBI ranks and scores on different aspects of transparency, accountability and participation has been instrumental in drawing attention of policymakers in several countries and motivated them to act towards making their budgets open for their citizens. To cite an example of this, the recent OBI -2008 results for Afghanistan actuated the government of Afghanistan to clarify the reasons for inability to bring the desired openness in the Afghani budget and the Finance Ministry to Afghanistan Government did commit to make the budget documents available for public scrutiny by enhancing its access by the common citizens. Coming to the methodology of ranking the countries, the OBI assigns a score to each country based on the information it makes available to the public throughout the budget process. The Open Budget Survey is based on a detailed questionnaire (See Box-1) that is intended to collect a comparative dataset on the public availability of budget information and other accountable budgeting practices in 85 countries. It guides civil society researchers from each country through each of the four stages (such as formulation, enactment, implementation and audit) of the budget process, assisting them in evaluating the information that should be made available to the public at each stage. It also identifies and evaluates accountable budgeting practices during each stage of the budget year.
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[The above write up has been prepared by Siba Sankar Mohanty who works as an honorary research advisor and an honorary policy director on Social Exclusion and Discrimination with the Network for Social Accountability (NSA). The writer seeks to thank International Budget Partnership (IBP) for the opportunity provided by IBP to let the author work as a researcher for both the rounds of OBI in India. The purpose of the present paper is to put in place the essence of discussions and numerous reservations on the study by many people the writer had personally encountered during the process of the survey. The views expressed here are the sole responsibility of the author unless otherwise stated in this brief. No other organisations like IBP, CBGA (where the author was working during the surveys) and NSA may be held responsible for any interpretation of the views presented here. The writer is also thankful to a number of other people, civil society activists, budget experts, bureaucrats at the Ministry of Finance and Members of Parliament for their inputs during the survey. The writer can be contacted at <ssmoh_1976@yahoo.co.uk > |
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Some related Links for Open Budget Index-2008 for India India not transparent enough in Budget-making-The Financial Express Govt doesn't share all budget info: Survey -ENS Economic BureauIndia ranks 13 in financial transparency scale
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