engleski

Expanding Quantitative to Qualitative Local Government Budget Transparency Measurements: The Case of Croatian OLBI and OLBI+

Measuring and understanding local government (LG) budget transparency (LBT) has been an important challenge. Since 2015, the Institute of Public Finance (IPF), has been publishing the Open Local Budget Index (the OLBI), the annual measure of the availability of five key budget documents on the official websites of all 576 Croatian LGs – counties, cities and municipalities. As one of the important shortcomings of the OLBI has been its focus on the quantity of these documents, the IPF has developed the new OLBI+, which also captures their quality. This paper presents the development of the OLBI+, contributes to the scarce literature explaining developments and measurements of standardized online local government budget transparency (OLBT) and will, it is hoped, enable the replication of this measure in other environments. It also gives a brief overview of the initial first year application of the OLBI+ in Croatia, averaging 69 (out of a possible 100) for all LGs, but with huge differences among them. One of the biggest deficiencies observed is the lack of budget documents with narrative explanations and in machine readable format, which weakens the possibilities for public monitoring and participation in local budget processes.

local governments ; budget transparency indices ; Croatia

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