The new IPF Note Budget outturns of Croatian municipalities, cities and counties in 2021 and 2022, written by Mihaela Bronić, Katarina Ott, Simona Prijaković and Branko Stanić, aims to provide a systematic overview of basic information on budget outturns of local government units in Croatia, their revenues and expenditures as well as surpluses/deficits for 2021 and 2022. The data has been collected through the Ministry of Finance’s database. The analysis and the data additionally provided in Excel format enable the interested public to get an insight into the financial condition of all Croatian municipalities, cities and counties in the two years concerned, to make comparisons with the situation in previous years and compare their local government unit with others.

In the period 2019-2022, total revenues and expenditures of local government units have been increasing, with the exception of the pandemic year 2020. The trend visible in the observed period is the increase of both revenues and expenditures, both total and per capita, regardless of the type of local government unit (except total and per capita expenditures in municipalities in 2022). In addition, more and more cities and municipalities record higher per capita revenues, while fewer and fewer cities record lower revenues. If we exclude municipalities, which recorded more-or-less balanced budgets throughout the observed period and counties, which recorded a constant trend of surplus growth on average, cities managed to pull through the turbulent deficit period and all local government units finished 2022 with budget surpluses.

The authors hope that this analysis would stimulate: 

• the public to study in more detail the abundant databases managed by the Ministry of Finance and their local government units and obtain more information on how the money in their local budgets is being collected and spent; 
• the Ministry of Finance to start publishing, in addition to the data already published, machine readable databases of local government units’ budgets which include annual financial reports of all legal entities owned or co-owned by local government units and institutions established by them, with clarifications on the scope, methodology, gaps in data series and regular updates of the databases; 
• the Ministry of Finance to upgrade the portal used for publishing local budgets in the period 2015-2022, Financial reporting in the budgetary system and the Registry of Budgetary and Extra-budgetary Users, by enabling an option to download budgets of all local government units and their budgetary and extra-budgetary users for all years at once; currently, users can only download the budget of each local government unit or each (extra-)budgetary user separately.