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5. Budget Transparency and Accountability in Mexico: High Hopes, Low Performance
- Brookings Institution Press
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Budget Transparency and Accountability in Mexico: High Hopes, Low Performance john m. ackerman One would expect the emergence of democratic political competition in Mexico over the past decade to have had an immediate and irreversible impact on budget transparency and accountability.1 Competition between different parties should lead to increased mutual oversight. In addition, the real possibility of losing political power at the next election should create strong incentives for government officials to reach out to citizens by involving and informing them better. Nevertheless, progress has been extremely slow, and in some areas there are even signs of reversal. Mexico’s Open Budget Index (OBI) scores are remarkably low, especially given the size of the country’s economy and the relative strength of its government institutions. Mexico received a score of fifty in 2006, improved slightly to fifty-five in 2008, and then dropped to fifty-two in 2010.2 The Latin American Index on Budget Transparency offers similar results. In that study, conducted in 2009, only 18 percent of those surveyed evaluated the government’s 130 5 My most sincere thanks go to Ivan Benumea, law student at Mexico’s Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), for his excellent research assistance. I would also like to thank Sanjeev Khagram, Paolo de Renzio, Archon Fung, Juan Pablo Guerrero, and the entire International Budget Partnership team as well as the authors of the other chapters in this volume for their important insights on previous drafts of this chapter. 1. Mexico’s authoritarian state-party regime officially came to an end with the election of opposition candidate Vicente Fox to the presidency in 2000. This electoral victory ended seventy-one years of continuous rule by the Party of the Institutional Revolution (PRI). In the midterm elections of 1997, the PRI lost its majority control over the Chamber of Deputies, the “lower” house responsible for passing the budget, as well as over Mexico City, the country’s political, economic, and demographic center. In addition, beginning in the 1980s the PRI slowly lost its hegemonic grip over the thirty-one state governments. In 2012, the PRI won back the presidency. It remains to be seen what impact this will have on budget transparency and accountability. 2. IBP (2010). 05-2337-0 CH 5:PWW 2284-7 3/11/13 2:27 PM Page 130 performance positively and only 5 percent thought that adequate channels existed for citizen participation.3 These low scores are also surprising because Mexico recently enacted a strong Access to Information Law that has been recognized as one of the model reforms in the world.4 The country also has several strong civil society budget oversight groups that have used the law to obtain data on a wide variety of topics. But regardless of this apparently positive operating environment, Mexico continues to be only a mediocre performer with regard to transparency. This chapter tries to explain the slow and irregular pace of change in Mexico. What reforms have been implemented, and how have they affected the budgetary and spending process? What political, institutional, and social factors might explain the uneven transformation of budget (and spending) accountability? What solutions might exist to the problem? I begin by outlining the state of budget transparency in Mexico today and by tracing a timeline of the specific institutional and legal changes that have occurred during the fifteen-year period of political democratization. I then explore the underlying causes of and explanations for the current state of budget transparency in Mexico and briefly analyze the extent to which civil society has used budget information and the impact that this has had on government policies. I conclude with specific proposals on how to encourage positive change in the future. The State of Budget Transparency in Mexico The Mexican government complies with the basic level of budget information required to keep bureaucratic control over public spending. The executive budget proposal is well organized, with expenditures categorized by administrative, functional , and economic categories, although it also leaves a dangerously wide margin for discretionary spending. It also includes a detailed report on different sources of revenue, and there is basic comparability between each year’s expenditures . There are no overtly “secret” spending categories. During the year, the executive dutifully complies with its monthly “in-year reports” on spending, and at the end of the fiscal year a relatively independent and well-funded Superior Federal Auditor (Auditoría Superior de la Federación, ASF) conducts a thorough review of...