Participatory budgeting for V4 capital cities

The transparency of public budgeting helps in reducing the risk of corruption, spotting dysfunctions, and thus can make the public government more efficient by not wasting public money. Budget decisions are about using public resources to meet community needs.

With regard to transparency of budget documents Hungary is not performing well among the Visegrad countries. Budget documents are not available or are published with considerable delay. While all of the Visegrad countries have problems with reviewing their budgetary process during the fiscal year (Mid-Year Review), Hungary could learn from Poland or Slovakia on how to start the budgetary planning process and pick up good practices from all the other Visegrad  countries on increasing the information on budget data available online and providing generally more details on the financial position of the public government.

The final regional comparative  study on the state-of-play of participatory budgeting in the Visegrad countries, along with the specific case studies on the V4 capital cities can be downloaded from the project website. For the Budapest case study, see below.

The BI was contracted by the Polish Collegium Civitas to prepare the Hungarian case study as part of the project financed by the International Visegrad Fund.