Twenty Years of Open Budgets: Transparency Has Advanced, But Accountability Has Not Kept Pace
Over twenty years and ten rounds of assessments, the Open Budget Survey has tracked how governments manage public money: what they disclose, who they consult, and how they are held to account. Transparency has improved globally, but the results show a persistent gap between formal improvements and the accountability mechanisms that would make them matter. More governments are publishing budget information. But too often, the public still cannot see whether money was spent as promised, whether oversight institutions acted on what they found, or whether public input shaped decisions. This report draws on two decades of evidence to assess where budget accountability has genuinely strengthened, where it has stalled, and what needs to change.
Two Decades of Incremental Progress
What is the Open Budget Survey?
Implemented globally for more than two decades, the Open Budget Survey (OBS) is a globally recognized benchmark for assessing government accountability in public finance. It measures accountability across three pillars:
Transparency
Is there timely, accessible, and comprehensive information about how government budgets are planned and spent?
Participation
Do civil society and the broader public (including historically excluded groups) have structured opportunities to engage at key moments and influence budget choices?
Oversight
Do the legislature and audit institutions have the authority and practices needed to review the budget and scrutinize how it is implemented?
Together, they determine whether constituencies and their representatives can see how public money is planned and spent, question decisions and deviations, and influence priorities before and during implementation. In this sense, the survey acts as a proxy for democratic credibility in public finance: it signals whether budget systems are open enough to support trust, contestation and corrective action.
Global Budget Accountability in 2025
Global Overview
The Open Budget Survey 2025 results show modest improvement since 2023, but a consistent pattern holds: progress has been strongest where practices are easiest to establish and are–in time– institutionalized, and accountability depends on how institutions engage with and act on budget information, not just whether it exists. These practices matter even more at a moment when governments are managing rising debt costs and tighter budgets, and the public needs to be able to see how those pressures are being handled. The findings below show where each pillar stands and how the picture has shifted over time.
OBS 2025 shows modest but meaningful progress
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Regional Overview
The regional picture shows both progress and unevenness. Eastern Europe and Central Asia and East Asia and Pacific are now among the strongest-performing regions by average Transparency scores. Their governments also publish close to seven of the eight key budget documents on average.
Latin America and the Caribbean has also shown broad and steady improvement, with progress on the publication of Citizens Budgets.
Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East and North Africa have improved from lower starting points but remain below the global average.
For the first time, Albania scored above 61, the threshold the OBS considers sufficient for meaningful public understanding and engagement in dialogue around the budget. It joins 20 other countries that met this mark in 2025. Among them is Ukraine, which returned above the threshold after Russia’s invasion disrupted budget publication and drove its score down sharply in 2023.
Brazil, Guatemala, and Benin all improved participation practices such that their OBS participation scores jumped by more than 20 points since OBS 2023.
The progress documented over two decades of OBS rounds is real. Yet formal gains in budget openness and public confidence in government have not increased in tandem. Gallup World Poll data shows that median global confidence in national government stayed mostly the same, increasing only from 48% to 50% between 2006 and 2024, over the entire period the OBS has been running. Budget openness is only one factor shaping public trust. But this pattern reinforces a central lesson from the OBS: publishing more information does not automatically make governments more accountable or more trusted.
The Gap Between Formal Practices and Real Accountability
Before the budget is approved, legislatures have less time to review plans
The first warning sign of declining oversight appears before the fiscal year begins. In the 71 countries assessed from 2017 to 2025, legislatures are receiving and approving budget proposals later, leaving less time to scrutinize spending plans before the fiscal year begins. OBS indicators that track these practices dropped by an average of nearly 5 points over this period. When legislatures have less time to review the budget, they have less room to question assumptions, examine trade-offs, and consider whether spending plans match public priorities.
Legislative control has weakened during budget execution. Across comparable countries from OBS 2017 and OBS 2025, legislative oversight was reduced over executive decisions to shift funds, spend excess revenues, or cut spending when revenues fall short. These declines were largest in low-income and lower-middle income countries. IBP’s research on budget credibility has shown that these are precisely the moments where chronic underspending against approved budgets is most common, especially in social sectors that often get deprioritized, such as in health and education.
Executive discretion grows where oversight is weakest and transparency is lowest
These legislative oversight failures are compounded by a deeper transparency gap at the budget execution stage. Governments disclose far less information during budget execution than during formulation, leaving legislatures and the public with less information to work with precisely when oversight is most needed. Governments report their budget plans with considerably more detail and consistency than they disclose how those plans change during the year.
Budget execution-stage documents, including In-Year Reports, Mid-Year Reviews, and Year-End Reports, are published less frequently and with less detail than budget formulation documents. The Mid-Year Review, designed to explain how a government has adjusted its priorities and spending at the halfway point of the year, is the least published of all key budget documents: only 41% of the 82 countries assessed in OBS 2025 make it publicly available on time.
Public participation often stops at consultation
Public engagement follows the same pattern. Meaningful public participation requires two things governments rarely provide: clear information before engagement begins, and a public account of what happened to people’s input after it ends.
OBS 2025 shows that participation is weak at both points. Most governments do not provide sufficiently comprehensive information on the purpose, scope, or timeline of participation. Follow-up is also limited: more than half of governments ask communities for input on their budgets, but only 7 countries publish information on both the inputs received and how those inputs were used. Without clear information in advance, public input is poorly informed; without meaningful reporting afterward, the public never learns whether their input shaped priorities or decisions.
Audit findings too often fail to trigger action
The accountability gap continues after the budget year ends. Supreme Audit Institutions produce independent audit assessments of whether public money was spent as intended and according to rules and procedures. But audit reports matter most when legislatures review them publicly and governments respond to their findings.
SAIs themselves have maintained, and slightly improved, their independence and capacity since OBS 2017, and many countries have strengthened their auditing practices. But the systems that should translate audit findings into changed government behavior are not keeping pace. The OBS indicator tracking whether executives publicly report on steps taken in response to audit recommendations has barely moved in eight years: from an average score of 10 out of 100 in OBS 2017 to 13 in OBS 2025. This is where the accountability chain often breaks: audit findings may be published, but too rarely trigger visible correction.
The central risk: openness is improving faster than accountability
Taken together, these patterns show a budget cycle where governments can increasingly move away from their approved plans, shift money between priorities, and change spending commitments with too little outside scrutiny. The risk is not only that some information is missing. It is that the weakest points in the accountability system appear at the very moments when decisions have the greatest effect on services, fiscal credibility, and public trust.
What Gets Watched Gets Disclosed
Across countries, civil society organizations have demonstrated that monitoring how budgets are spent, not just how they are planned, is one of the most powerful tools available to drive both greater transparency and better services.
These examples show that when governments know civil society is tracking the gap between what is promised and what is delivered, the pressure to disclose, justify, and correct budget decisions increases.
The Escalating Fight Over Revenue, Debt, and the Hidden Corners of the Budget
Fiscal pressures on governments are rising around the world. The IMF estimates that global public debt reached 94% of global GDP in 2025 and will reach 100% of GDP by 2029, even as borrowing costs remain high. In the decades ahead, governments will face growing pressure to pay for public services, climate adaptation, and long-term development, while managing higher debt burdens and tighter budgets.
As financial pressures grow, governments face harder choices about raising money, borrowing, and managing future obligations. Public trust depends on making those trade-offs visible: not only what governments plan to spend, but where the money comes from, how debt is contracted, and what costs are being pushed into the future.
Governments disclose too little about the revenue they give up
Tax expenditures are revenues governments give up through exemptions, credits, and other tax breaks for particular sectors, companies, or groups. Globally, tax expenditures (the revenue forgone due to tax exemptions, deductions, and reduced rates) average about 23% of total tax revenue. The OBS indicator on whether governments disclose projected tax expenditures in their draft budgets has barely moved in eight years.
Of 82 countries assessed disclose nothing in their budget proposals about tax expenditures for the upcoming year
Borrowing is visible, but fiscal sustainability remains opaque
Debt reporting shows the same gaps. In OBS 2025, governments more often publish basic borrowing and debt figures than in 2017, but they are far less consistent in disclosing information that helps citizens and oversight institutions understand whether debt is affordable, how exposed governments are to refinancing or exchange-rate risks, and what borrowing levels could mean for future fiscal sustainability.
Of 82 countries assessed provide no debt composition data in budget proposals
Of 82 countries assessed do not provide any information in their budget proposals to assess fiscal sustainability over the next decade
Potential future public costs remain hidden
Governments provide limited reporting on fiscal risks in budget proposals including costs that may become real public obligations in the future. These include arrears, losses from state-owned companies, loan guarantees, or public-private partnership commitments.
Of 78 countries assessed to have arrears provide no information on the stock of arrears in their budget proposals
Reporting on quasi-fiscal activities is also weak: actions by state-owned enterprises or central banks that work like public spending but sit outside the regular budget. These activities can create costs for governments. The IMF estimates that state-owned enterprise losses and guarantees are the largest source of hidden debt in emerging market and developing economies, for example, when electricity is sold below cost, governments may have to cover the resulting losses.
Of the 81 countries assessed with quasi-fiscal activities provide no information on them in their budget proposals
Of 82 countries assessed do not report on contingent liabilities in their budget proposals
Together, these findings point to a deeper problem: governments can publish more standard budget information while still leaving major fiscal choices in the dark. Without fuller disclosure of fiscal activities outside the budget, future obligations, and hidden risks, citizens cannot judge whether public finances are genuinely sustainable.
Results shown above reflect the 82 countries assessed in OBS 2025. Historical data for all countries covered in past rounds is available here.
Resilience: Where Reform Has Endured
Twenty years of evidence from the Open Budget Survey make clear that opening a budget system is a different challenge from sustaining one. Early gains are achievable in a relatively short period of time by closing the most visible gaps in disclosure, establishing initial mechanisms for public input, and putting basic formal oversight processes in place. What proves harder is consolidating the initial progress into routine practice. This requires publishing more complex information across the full budget cycle and the full fiscal picture, building public engagement mechanisms that meaningfully shape decisions, and giving oversight institutions the independence and capacity to act. Shifting priorities, political transitions, and fiscal shocks all test whether reforms have taken root or remain fragile.
Across the OBS, scores at or above 61 indicate sufficient or adequate practice on the relevant pillar, creating the enabling conditions for meaningful accountability. Resilience means more than reaching a benchmark score. It means that open budget practices continue over time, survive changes in leadership or political pressure, and become embedded in the institutions that manage, review, and scrutinize public money.
Bright Spots Around the World
A smaller group has moved past these obstacles. These cases show where early progress has been consolidated, or where there is a clear path to consolidation. Across these cases, three factors recur: legal or institutional anchors that embed practices beyond any single administration, a technically capable budget office with a sustained commitment to openness, and civil society engagement that has kept demand for accountability alive during periods of political pressure or where civic space has narrowed. The cases demonstrate that sustained reform can take root anywhere, regardless of income level and even amidst other governance challenges. They also show that progress depends not only on political will, but on institutions, relationships, and continued public demand.
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What Twenty Years Has Taught Us
When the Open Budget Survey began in 2006, the very premise was contested. The idea that budget information should be publicly available, and that countries could be assessed and compared on whether they made it so, faced resistance from governments and skepticism from many in the international community. Twenty years later, that argument is largely settled. The timely publication of budget documents and information has become an expectation, rather than an exception in most countries the OBS assesses.
The question now centers on whether publication produces accountability, whether disclosed documents reflect fiscal reality, whether the institutions meant to scrutinize them can act on what they find, and whether the budget cycle closes with follow-through rather than dissipating after enactment.
Three lessons stand out from the twenty years of survey data
Fiscal transparency measures must also contend with the fact that governments are increasingly managing money outside of the traditional budget process. Off-balance-sheet financing, contingent liabilities concentrated in state-owned enterprises, and new financial instruments are increasingly material to the fiscal picture, but they often remain largely outside what current disclosure standards are designed to capture.
Meanwhile, the conditions that turn transparency into accountability are deteriorating on multiple fronts. Civic space is contracting. Legislative oversight has not recovered from a decade of erosion. Audit findings continue to go unanswered. And declining international aid is hollowing out the civil society capacity that often drives public pressure and demand for reforms, especially in countries where government commitment has been weakest.
The agenda ahead is not a continuation of the last twenty years. It is a shift, from getting documents published to making sure those documents are accurate, scrutinized, and acted on, and from investing in government disclosure practices to investing in the wider ecosystem that makes that disclosure consequential. That is what turns open budgets into more effective government, better services and improved lives.
Recommendations
The OBS shows a gap between what governments publish and whether that publication produces accountability. PFM reforms and donor strategies have often invested in transparency, while underinvesting in the legislative, audit, and civil society capacity that turns transparency into accountability.
Transparency
Focus openness efforts beyond budget basics to places where the biggest fiscal risks sit and where scrutiny is weakest.
Governments
- Go beyond standard budget documents by publishing more on implementation, financing, and fiscal risks, including clearer disclosure on debt terms and composition, tax expenditures, arrears, guarantees, and state-owned enterprises.
Civil Society
- Demand transparency and use available information to assess what risks are being taken on, who bears the costs, and whether spending responds to people’s needs.
Development Partners
- Treat fiscal risk, debt, and revenue transparency as core, not optional.
- Support civil society, legislatures, and audit offices to bolster domestic oversight of fiscal risks and their effects on fiscal space and services.
Participation
Create deeper opportunities for public engagement and show how public input shaped what was decided
Governments
- Create opportunities for the public to engage across budget formulation and implementation.
- Announce mechanisms clearly, reach affected communities with usable information, and report back on whether input shaped decisions.
Civil Society
- Help make participation spaces inclusive by building traditionally excluded communities’ capacity to inform fiscal decisions, translating budget information into accessible formats, and contributing evidence-based inputs.
Development Partners
- Support civil society capacity and coalition strategies for improving how governments raise and spend public funds.
Oversight
Reclaim oversight as a check on executive power, with review before spending shifts and follow-through after audits.
Legislatures
- Apply pressure on executives to release timely budget information, focusing greater scrutiny on in-year change: spending shifts between ministries, spending excess revenues, and cuts when revenues fall short.
- Hold public hearings on audit reports and work with auditors and civil society to ensure executives follow through on recommendations transparently.
Development Partners
- Support legislative PFM capacity and audit independence, as well as opportunities for the public to engage with oversight actors.
More than twenty years in, the OBS is changing alongside the field it helped advance. The OBS began by asking whether governments publish budget information. Transparency alone, it is now clear, is not enough. As the OBS evolves, the next phase will ask whether that information changes how public resources are raised, allocated and spent. The vision is for our work to become a starting point for reform rather than a periodic measurement, with revised assessments of participation and oversight, new modules on emerging fiscal issues, and sustained engagement with the civil society groups, legislatures, audit institutions, and finance ministries that act on those findings. Effectively and credibly measuring budget openness was the work of the first 20 years of the OBS. Making openness count is the work ahead.
David Robins
Sally Torbert
Laura Castillo Cabral
Alex Kreko
Elena Mondo
Cynthia Romero
Rajan Zaveri
Lilianna Ziedins
