Sri Lanka as one of the lowest ranking nations in civil society contribution to the national budget which hinders the formulation of a comprehensive budget should be taken seriously, said heads of think tanks and policy advocates at a forum in Colombo on Friday.
“Much more than the ranking, the implications of not having civil society views and expectations adequately represented in Budget formulation is much more serious a problem,” a participant at a symposium on “Budgeting for the Future – Prioritising Inclusion and Equity”, said.
The event was organised by the Coalition for Inclusive Impact (CII), in collaboration with the Advocata Institute, Arutha Research, the Centre for Poverty Analysis (CEPA) and Verite Research.
“A budget without numbers is not really a budget,” said Executive Director Verite Research, Dr. Nishan De Mel.
Questioning the integrity of national budgets, he said 89% of the highest-value expenditure proposals in the 2023 budget lacked progress information.
De Mel noted on the day of the Budget speech, Parliament provided three key documents: the Budget speech, draft Budget estimates, and) the fiscal management report. The numbers presented across the reports contradict each other.
“Honesty is a key factor as Budgets can be misrepresented,” he said, adding that information deficiencies were observed in past Budgets.
Branding it as ‘Not Doing’, De Mel said only 16 percent of the proposals in the 2023 Budget was fully implemented.
Verite Reasearch noted that the 2023 Budget speech did not provide a real GDP growth projection for 2023. However, the Ministry of Finance (MoF), in its creditor update for 2022 (published in September 2022), estimated a real GDP contraction of 8.7 percent in 2022 and 3 percent in 2023.
