Mubarak’s Egypt bars public from budget process

I meant to post this a while ago:

Six countries bar public from budget process-study
WASHINGTON, Oct 18 (Reuters) – Six countries keep their constituents in the dark about the state of their budgets until they are adopted, a new study released on Wednesday showed.
The International Budget Project, formed within the private Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, released the first Open Budget Initiative 2006, an index of 59 countries on how well they open their budget books to the general public.
“The lack of access to information is a sign of unwillingness to be accountable to your citizens, an unwillingness to engage in a debate about a government’s financial activities,” said Pamela Gomez, project director for the study.
Angola, Burkina Faso, Chad, Egypt, Mongolia and Vietnam bar any public participation in their budget deliberations, while 25 of the countries polled fail to hold public hearings on the budget, the study showed.
Of the countries surveyed, 39 percent provide either minimal, scant or no information to citizens on their country’s budget, the group said.
The study’s finding show a very large number of countries produce the information but do not make it available to the public, Gomez said, adding that “they are producing it for internal use or for reporting to donors.”
“That was very much a surprise to us because we had expected that they would not be producing it at all,” she said. Rather, they do have the resources to produce the information, but “they choose not to to do so.”
Only six of the countries — France, New Zealand, Slovenia, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States, provide extensive information necessary for government accountability, the study said.
“Access to information on government financial activity in their budget is absolutely crucial to control corruption, crucial to improving delivery of services and essential for democratic accountability,” Gomez said.
The survey of the countries consisted of 122 questions and was conducted by non-governmental researchers or research organizations. The work was completed in October 2005.
The group intends to repeat the study every two years and expects it to be next published during the last quarter of 2008. The group plans to expand the number of countries to 80.