WFD established the first Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) in the Western Balkans with the agreement of the National Assembly of Republic of Serbia in September 2015.
The Budget Office, the focus of our work to 2018, provides financial information to parliamentarians and supports increased oversight of public money.
Reducing corruption is an important requirement for EU accession, a priority for Serbia, and strong financial oversight support this.
A growing number of parliaments throughout the world have established PBOs and the Serbian parliament joined this trend.
Working with parliamentary institutions – the Committee on Finance, State Budget and Control of Public Spending – the Budget Office is becoming embedded in parliamentary approaches. PBO staff were selected, trained and inducted through the WFD PBO Academy and are now fully embedded within the National Assembly of Republic of Serbia.
In 2017, the PBO introduced Serbia’s first Citizens budget. It was developed to present the most important data from the State Budget to citizens, with clear and understandable language. Communicating budget information to Serbian citizens is just one pillar of PBO mandate. Much larger pillar of PBO mandate is to support parliament’s oversight function, leading to greater government accountability and improve the public finances. Every citizen is affected by bad public finance management, as we witnessed during the 2007/8 economic crisis. More transparent and accountable governance is essential for quality of life.
More about the PBO project: www.pbk.rs
Country data
Population: 7 million
GDP: $38.3 billion (USD)
GNI per capita: $5,310 (USD)
Media freedom: 49/100 (partly free)
Democracy index: 76/100 (free)
Programme data
2011: year of first WFD programme
Results
More than 130 products, including analyses, briefs, infographics and publications created since 2015
4 PBO researchers have completed the 15 module PBO Academy
PBO internal structure, procedures and visual identity developed
PBO website launched, now with more than 10,000 views
Growing number of requests from MPs to provide supports
Established cooperation in regional and international networks (OECD, World Bank)
Highly developed in-house visualisation capacity
Established cooperation with various state institutions, and other important stakeholders in Serbia
Implementation
Supporting Serbia’s Parliamentary Budget Office and the regional Network of Parliamentary Committees
Planned end: March 2018
Related News
Team
Increasing openness of institutions in the Western Balkans
On 16 November, Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD) launched a Regional Road Map on Good Governance for the Western Balkans to support [...]
Follow the money: how WFD helped establish a watchdog in Mozambique
Democracy can help contrast corruption and enable fair distribution of resource by making information about government accounts available to the [...]
Scrutinising Government spending in Serbia
Ensuring taxpayers money ends up where citizens think it should requires time. Analysing the numbers, comparing levels of spend between [...]
