To turn their plans and commitments toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into actions, governments must ensure that the budgets they allocate toward the SDGs are properly executed. Many countries face challenges in meeting their planned annual expenditure and revenue targets, resulting in shortfalls and compromising their governments’ budget credibility. This challenge is acknowledged in SDG indicator 16.6.1, which measures actual government spending in comparison to approved budgets.
Where there are gaps between planned and actual expenditures, these can owe to high and persistent levels of inflation, which are often underestimated in approved budgets. In Argentina, runaway inflation has prompted significant budget modifications,1 with percentages that, between 2018 and 2020, fluctuated between 14 and 44 annual percentage points over the total budget. With that as context, this report examines budget credibility trends in seven sectors related to ten SDGs, analyzing the differences between Argentina’s approved and executed budgets in 2018, 2019, and 2020. It also compares these spending patterns with the country’s progress in achieving the SDGs, as shown by Argentina’s results in the 2021 Sustainable Development Report.
The analysis found no evidence demonstrating that the Government of Argentina is prioritizing resource allocation toward sectors where more progress is needed to achieve the SDGs, except for in the cases of social protection, gender, and health. Data on the health sector, in particular, reflects a 2020 legislative delegation on budget reallocations, which empowered the national executive to easily transfer resources from non-priority budget items to slow the spread of COVID-19.
This publication is a part of Connecting Budget Credibility to the Sustainable Development Goals
