Transparency of the central government budget – the Hungarian state-of-play

The International Budget Partnership (IBP) promotes the transparency of government budgets in partnership with national governments and civil experts, actors. The long term objective of the organisation is to use budget analysis and advocacy as tools to improve public governance and reduce poverty. The IBP has commissioned the Budapest Institute to report on the Hungarian case and map the relevant practices of Hungarian non-governmental stakeholders (primarily, professionals, independent experts, and media actors). The Open Budget Survey (OBS) Tracker is being introduced in July 2014 in Hungary. The aim of the OBS Tracker is to monitor the transparency of the fiscal framework, i.e. the publicity of the budgetary documents and databases via a traffic light system.

The role of the Budapest Institute is to map and analyse the period before and after the introduction of the OBS Tracker. Our aim is to assess the transparency of the fiscal framework based on qualitative methods (stakeholder mapping and survey, media content analysis, and expert interviews).

The report assessing the situation prior to the introduction of the Tracker tool is now available for download.