Budget transparency in Croatian counties, cities and municipalities (November 2016 – March 2017)

Abstract

The overall average level of budget transparency in Croatian local government units, measured by the number of budget documents published on their respective official websites, has improved year by year. In the current research cycle, it averages 3.1 (the maximum rank is 5), with counties already being very transparent (4.6 on average), cities fairly good (3.7 on average), but municipalities still inadequately transparent (2.8 on average). Despite the relatively solid averages, there are too many extremely non-transparent local government units. Four cities (Gospic, Imotski, Valpovo and Vrgorac) and as many as 39 municipalities have not published a single budget document that we were searching for, and another seven cities and 50 municipalities have published only one such document each. As in previous years, the most transparent local government units include very sparsely populated ones, such as Ribnik and Dekanovec, and local government units with low per capita income (e.g. Jarmina and Đelekovec). On the other hand, among the least transparent local government units there are units with very high total and per capita budget revenues (e.g. Sutivan, Solta, Dugopolje and Bol). Detailed results for all counties, cities and municipalities are given later in the text and are also available on the interactive map and in the Excel table.