ECONOMYNEXT – Most new spending proposals in Sri Lanka’s 2018 government budget are behind schedule in their implementation with only eight percent of promises progressing on track, the same rate as last year, a new study has found.
The study, presented ahead of the government’s 2019 budget next month by the Verité Research think-tank, found that progress on 33 percent of proposals presented in last year’s budget are either broken, neglected or undisclosed.
“We’re still doing really poorly in terms of progress,” Hasna Munas, an analyst at Verité Research, which tracked 38 budget promises amounting to 149,350 million rupees, which accounts for 82 percent of all new expenditure proposals in the 2018 budget speech.
The four-month study tracked progress of budget promises – new spending allocations – of over a billion rupees in the first six months of 2018, she told a news conference.
“This means that the government is either not doing what it is saying or not saying what it is doing for promises amounting to 60,200 million rupees,” said the study available on www.budgetpromises.org
“The bulk of new expenditure proposals in the 2018 budget (59 percent) are categorised as lagging in terms of their implementation.”
Subhashini Abeysinghe, research director of Verité Research, said the findings were presented ahead of next month’s government budget presentation to generate public interest in how their money is being spent.
“We want people to look back at previous budget,” she said. “Everyone gets hyped up about the budget at this time of year. We want to change the conversation and ask ‘is the government doing what it is saying? And is it saying what it is doing?”
(COLOMBO, 16 Octber, 2018)