Budget Watch – Institute of Public Policy

Budget Watch, a partnership between the Institute of Public Policy and ISEG (University of Lisbon) since 2013, is a project that aims to analyze the State Budget Proposal from the perspective of rigor, transparency and budgetary responsibility.

The analysis is exclusively technical, independent and objective, in light of good international reporting practices of the budget process, on issues such as:

The Budget rigor and responsibility;
Transparency and quality of the budgetary procedure;
The ability to control public consumption expenditure, especially in the most relevant sectors;
The sharing of efforts between Central, Regional and Local Administrations in the containment of public expenditure;
The transparency of flows between the Public Administrative and Business Sector;
The way future responsibilities (Public-Private Partnerships, guarantees, pensions) are properly considered.

2025 State Budget analysis

Budget Watch is back for its 14th edition with an analysis of the 2025 State Budget.
The State Budget is analysed in two stages. It begins with the production of a technical report on the State Budget prepared by an IPP/ISEG team (the Budget Watch Report). This is structured on the basis of a questionnaire on 10 principles of budgetary responsibility.
At a later stage, a group of economists, who make up the Budget Watch Scientific Advisory Board,* evaluate the SB by answering this questionnaire. The answers are then aggregated and result in the IPP/ISEG Budget Index, an index from 0 to 100 that reflects the rigour, transparency and responsibility of each budget.
In addition to Budget Watch, the Institute of Public Policy has already produced several Citizen Budgets, which aim to explain the State Budget to citizens, and is responsible in Portugal for the Open Budget Index, an initiative of the International Budget Partnership (IBP) to analyse budget transparency in more than 100 countries.
The Scientific Advisory Board for the 2024 edition (OE2025) is being finalised and will be announced shortly.
The team of rapporteurs, coordinated by Paulo Trigo Pereira and José Alves, is made up of Sofia Monteiro, Francesco Franco, Eduardo Costa, Teresa Garcia, Susana Peralta and Francisco Nunes.