The Open Budget Survey (OBS) 2025 finds that most of the world’s budgets are becoming more open. However, the wealth of evidence this survey has produced over the past twenty years reinforces the reality that greater transparency is not enough to ensure real accountability. That, in part, requires institutions that can independently assess budget information, and suggest and enforce corrective actions emerging from their assessments.
Moreover, while published budget documents put the government’s estimates and actual spending figures in public view, legislatures and citizens often lack the context to interpret them: whether economic forecasts are realistic, how much proposed policies or projects will really cost, and whether spending will follow the plan. This is the work that independent fiscal institutions (IFIs) do.
The Role of Independent Fiscal Institutions
IFIs are independent, non-partisan bodies, typically reporting to either the legislature or the executive, that analyze fiscal policy and performance. They typically include parliamentary budget offices and fiscal councils. IFIs can play a valuable role in closing transparency and oversight gaps, a value reflected in their increasing adoption in many countries. The OBS finds that the proportion of surveyed countries with an IFI has risen since 2017 from 24% to 27%. However, there is uneven adoption across regions—with Sub-Saharan Africa more proactively adopting the practice of establishing IFIs.
One core function of IFIs is conducting budget analysis and publishing forecasts that can inform budget oversight and inform public debate. Among comparable OBS countries, at least four in five IFIs published forecasts or forecast assessments in every survey round since 2017. IFIs can therefore provide legislatures the analytical footing to interrogate executive budget proposals. Moreover, IFIs can assess the fiscal risks that may not be disclosed or discussed in budget documents, independently of the executive.
IFI’s actual independence is shown by how well-designed those institutions are, and how they operate. For example, Uganda’s Parliamentary Budget Office, the strongest performing IFI among those assessed in Sub-Saharan Africa, was established to give parliament the technical capacity to interpret budget and economic data independently, producing quarterly performance reports that give parliament a continuous, independent read on budget performance. Brazil’s Instituto Fiscal Independente, also among the strongest IFIs assessed in our 2025 survey, publishes a monthly fiscal monitoring report with independent debt projections and assessments of fiscal rule compliance, giving legislators a continuous picture of the country’s fiscal position rather than a snapshot at budget approval. Slovakia’s Council for Budget Responsibility uses an innovative traffic light model to communicate fiscal risks to non-technical audiences, making the stakes of complex borrowing choices legible beyond specialist circles.
A snapshot of Slovakia’s Council for Budget Responsibility (CBR) budgetary traffic light model. The CBR uses this model to identify fiscal risks to achieving budgetary objectives, simplifying the communication of risks in budget decisions to non-technical audiences.
Recent research suggests this scrutiny has measurable effects. A new working paper examining 55 countries across Europe and Latin America found that establishing an IFI improves the accuracy of government growth and fiscal forecasts over time, consistent with the idea that sustained independent oversight reshapes how governments project and manage public finances.
Getting the Design Right
For IFIs to deliver on their mandate, two conditions matter. The first is institutional design. An IFI with an inadequate mandate, insufficient resources, or low visibility cannot meaningfully reduce the information asymmetry between executives and legislators or keep fiscal risks in public view. The OECD’s principles for independent fiscal institutions, covering independence, mandate breadth, access to information and transparency, offer a practical benchmark for what well-functioning institutions look like.
The second condition is that IFIs are treated as part of a broader accountability ecosystem. Our analysis finds that IFI strength is positively associated with OBS transparency and oversight scores, signaling that countries with stronger fiscal institutions tend to have stronger transparency and oversight practices. The relationship is far from deterministic, and the direction of influence is hard to pin down. What this points at, however, is that IFIs’ work truly contributes to improving accountability when it’s shared with and used by other actors in the ecosystem.
The OBS’s two decades of evidence show that publishing more budget information is not the same as being held accountable. What converts disclosure into accountability are institutions with the independence, capacity, and mandate to act on what they find, and legislatures with the tools to do the same. IFIs, when well-designed and properly supported, are among the most practical investments a country can make in closing that accountability gap.
This article was reposted from the International Budget Partnership website.
