Supported by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, International Budget Partnership, Washington, USA, the Institute of Public Finance participated in a campaign for assessing openness of budgets. Initially, the campaign's goal was to assess the level of practical accessibility of people around the world to information through a simple one-year project, which entailed local groups working in each of the 50-80 countries asking their respective governments the same set of five to six questions. The questions focused on gathering budget information that related to issues as diverse as health care, environmental preservation, and aid effectiveness and resulted in several sets of data, including issue-specific, country-level budget information and data on the governments’ response rates to the information requests.
The campaign developed several databases that are used to store, sort, and analyse the project results and are available to every local partner.