Budget transparency of Croatian counties, cities and municipalities

Abstract

This paper aims to analyse the openness, i.e. transparency of the budgets of local units in Croatia. The idea was to find out whether citizens have access to the 2013 budget proposal, enacted budget and citizens budget on the websites of their respective local units. The analysis has shown that the level of openness of local budgets, notably in municipalities, is very low, and that few local units try to bring their budgets closer to citizens, while many of them have very poor websites or no websites at all (some municipalities, for example). Nevertheless, it is encouraging, that there are units with excellent websites. For more opneness of the local budgets, it is necessary to reform the local unit system, to improve the co-operation of the Government and Ministry of Finance with the Croatian County Association and the associations of cities and municipalities in promoting the openness of their budgets, tighten the transparency control of the local units' budgets and step up the efforts of the units themselves to publish budget documents in a timely manner and to improve markedly the quality of the websites.