Since the start of the Open Budget Survey, most governments in Eastern Europe and Central Asia have committed to enhancing budget transparency and have intensified their efforts to disclose documents and data and embed transparency into laws and regulations. With a 10-point jump from 2008, this region is 1 point away from reaching the threshold of sufficient budget transparency and joining the “61+ club”. This reflects the region’s evolution in its understanding – and implementation – of budget openness. An open budget agenda in many of these countries has evolved from a donor-imposed set of reforms to an internally driven requirement by citizens who are increasingly interested in how their money is spent.

Challenges, however, persist. Several countries in the region still suffer from significant corruption and development challenges and have not managed to institutionalize transparency as part of the formal framework to manage public resources. In most countries, citizens lack meaningful opportunities to effectively participate in the budget process and legislatures and audit institutions do not have sufficient oversight. 

The region includes countries with different backgrounds, traditions, languages and religions.  Yet, during the communist period they all conformed to a “wall of silence” doctrine — a political culture that suppressed freedom of speech and information — which included budget secrecy. Transparency often amounted to publishing annual or multiannual plans on results to be achieved, without any economic analysis backing those assumptions up or basic data on revenues and expenditures. Yet, over the course of several decades, many countries in the region have vastly transformed their budgetary practices as part of their post-communist transitions. However, we know this trajectory, and the incentives driving change, looks quite different across the region, which also varies vastly in its performance on other governance and democratic measures.

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The Open Budget Survey (OBS) is the world’s only independent, comparative and fact-based research instrument that uses internationally accepted criteria to assess public access to central government budget information; formal opportunities for the public to participate in the national budget process; and the role of budget oversight institutions, such as legislatures and national audit offices, in the budget process.

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