Improving Budget Transparency
Posted by Bill Dorotinsky
Sometimes in searching the internet, you find PFM web sites that are hollow, and sometimes you find very rich sites indeed. And having just been on mission to Bangladesh, it is even nicer to find a Finance Ministry working hard at the reforms mirrored on their web site. The Bangladeshi Finance Division web site is definitely worth a visit.
The site includes a good deal of information about the annual budget, including a budget in brief and the annual budget speech, recent Economic Review, several years of past budgets for reference, and their budget call circular (the latter in Bangla, of course). Of interest to PFM practitioners in particular, the site includes much detail on the Bangladeshi effort to implement a medium-term expenditure framework (MTEF) -- being expanded to 16 of 51 ministries for the FY2008 budget. Through the prior years budgets on the site, one can trace the evolution of the MTEF.
For monitoring and managing expenditures, the site includes reports on Annual Development Plan expenditure progress, monthly fiscal reports from January 2003-4, and most recently to-be monthly macrofiscal reports.
Some of the more innovative bits of information on the site, pushing transparency forwward, include:
- report on the terms and conditions of public sector loans, including interest rates (local and foreign currency), repayment and grace periods, and other salient features, and
- flash reports on the financial and production performance of the three larger state-owned enterprises (see lower right-hand section of the Finance Division web page)
We look forward to seeing how the Finance Division site -- and Bangladeshi PFM reforms -- progress.
