
The Impact of the International Budget Partnership’s Open Budget Survey and its Partner Institutions’ Advocacy on Budget Transparency in Honduras
By Hugo Noe Pino (Instituto Centroamericano de Estudios Fiscales).
This case study looks at how the preparation and publication of the Open Budget Survey 2010 in Honduras increased awareness of Honduras’ budget transparency problems. The increased attention given to these issues brought together local civil society organizations, the International Budget Partnership, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and the government of Honduras to make progress on budget transparency. Also, the IBP’s technical assistance to the government of Honduras played an important role in the recent publication of budget documents, which combined with a strong government will have provided the basis for public finance management reforms. Although the main incentive for the government to improve its budget transparency was initially to increase foreign aid contributions, citizen-led efforts to demand reform are growing.
The one-page summary and full version of this case study are available in English.

Latin America and the Caribbean: Open Budget Survey 2021
The Open Budget Survey (OBS) is an assessment of fiscal transparency, public participation and formal oversight in the budget process across a range of countries, conducted every two years.
This brief focuses on the OBS performance of a number of countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. With a few exceptions, the region is close to consolidating budget systems that generate and publish sufficient information for citizens to understand how their governments spend. Download the report in Spanish and English.

Reforming the governance of tax expenditures in Latin America
One of the three issues our research has identified that characterizes the management of tax expenditures in Latin America is decision-making processes that are opaque, closed to a limited number of actors, and not linked to the annual budget process. In this brief, we look at the ways in which governments decide upon and manage tax expenditures and the degree to which current arrangements allow for their effective use as fiscal policy instruments.
This publication is part of the LATERAL project, which has brought together a group of civil society organizations from across Latin America and the Caribbean to better understand and influence the ways in which governments use—or abuse—tax expenditures as tools for fiscal policy and economic development.

Counted But Not Accountable: Tax Expenditure Transparency in Latin America
Across Latin America, tax expenditures are reducing government revenues by between 10 and 20 percent, but adequate information on their objectives, beneficiaries, and ultimate impact is lacking. This brief looks at some more general data on transparency practices on tax expenditures and then presents the results of a mini-survey for Latin America to facilitate cross-country comparisons and encourage debate on areas in which governments need to improve on their tax expenditure transparency practices.
Download PDF in English
Download PDF in Spanish
Related
- Latin America Tax Expenditure Research, Advocacy, and Learning (LATERAL) project overview
- Tax Expenditures in Latin America: A Civil Society Perspective (January 2019)
- Evaluating Tax Expenditures: A Framework for Civil Society Researchers (June 2018)
- A Quick Guide to Researching Tax Expenditures in Latin America (June 2018)
- Tax Expenditures and Inequality in Latin America (June 2018)