Open Budgets in Africa: Tokenistic?

Matt Andrews recently posted an interesting analysis in his blog. Measuring the difference in transparency between budget formulation and budget execution, Matt finds that “Most countries have a gap between the scores they get in transparency of budget preparation and transparency of budget execution. Indeed, 63% of the countries have more transparency in budget formulation than in budget execution.” And he concludes that “countries with higher OBI scores tend to have relatively bigger gaps than the others—so that I am led to believe that countries generally focus on improving transparency in formulation to get better scores (with efforts to make execution getting less attention).” He has also written a second post about it and the IBP folks have replied to him here.

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Also read

Open Government and Democracy 

The Uncertain Relationship Between Open Data and Accountability

4 thoughts on “Open Budgets in Africa: Tokenistic?

  1. Have you encountered governments highly concerned about increasing OBI scores? My sense is that governments have far more incentives to improve PEFA scores – that might have a knock-on effect. There is an orthodox view, among IFI experts, that budget planning is more critical than execution that is somewhat reflected in PEFA.

  2. Pingback: What is Open Government and Is it Working? | Aspen Institute Communications & Society Program

  3. Pingback: What is Open Government and Is It Working? | Reboot

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