Topic Guide: the Budget Process

Open budget survey - producing the open budget index (OBI). IBP, bi-annually (most recently available: 2012). http://internationalbudget.org/what-we-do/open-budget-survey/  

The Open Budget Survey measures the state of budget transparency, participation, and oversight in countries around the world. It consists of 125 questions and is completed by independent researchers in the countries assessed. The majority of the questions relates directly to the public availability and comprehensiveness of the eight key budget documents that governments should publish at various points of the budget cycle. In order to allow for comparisons across countries and over time, the IBP calculates the OBI, a simple average of the quantified responses for the 95 survey questions that are related to budget transparency. The OBI assigns each country a score that can range from 0 to 100. The 2012 OBI covered 100 countries.