PH tops Southeast Asia in budget transparency — survey

MANILA, Philippines — The Philippines remained the most transparent country in Southeast Asia in terms of budget openness, according to the results of the 2025 Open Budget Survey (OBS).

The independent global assessment of government budget transparency, public participation, and oversight conducted by the International Budget Partnership (IBP) gave the Philippines a transparency score of 76 out of 100, slightly higher than its score of 75 in 2023.

The rating was well above the 61-point threshold considered “sufficient,” with the OBS explaining that a score of 61 and above “indicates that a country is publishing a sufficient volume of budget information.”

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This information, the survey said, “provides meaningful coverage of core fiscal data, enabling the public to understand government budget decisions and supporting informed public debate on fiscal policy.”

The Philippines’ score also exceeded the global average of 45 and the Asia-Pacific average of 49.

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The transparency component of the OBS measures public access to information on how central governments raise and spend public resources. It evaluates the online availability, timeliness, and comprehensiveness of eight key budget documents using 109 equally weighted indicators and scores countries on a scale of zero to 100.

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With its latest rating, the Philippines continued to outperform its Southeast Asian neighbors, including Indonesia (71), Thailand (55), Cambodia (54), Vietnam (51), and Malaysia (51).

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However, the country’s scores in public participation and legislative oversight declined. Its public participation score fell from 37 in 2023 to 33 in 2025, while its legislative oversight score dropped from 81 in 2023 to 58 in 2025.

For Dr. Alicor Panao, Inquirer data scientist and associate professor at the University of the Philippines, the findings reveal a contradiction.

“This is kind of a paradox because even if the Philippines leads in transparency in Asia, its public participation is low, even by the report’s standard,” Panao said.

Legislative oversight refers to the process by which a legislature reviews, monitors, and supervises how the executive branch implements the national budget and carries out laws passed by Congress.

“It is a core function of the ‘power of the purse’ and a fundamental part of the checks and balances system in a democracy,” he said.

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“So notice in the short span of years between study periods, you see a huge drop in oversight, pulling down overall oversight score. Legislative oversight of the budget in the Philippines is weak because the budget process itself is structurally vulnerable to abuse, with a tradition allowing amendments to be finalized in clandestine after the budget is passed,” Panao said.

Before long-standing small committees were abolished last year for the 2026 budget process, Panao said a “small closed-door committee effectively gives a handful of lawmakers a blank check to insert pet projects with no public record, while the unprogrammed appropriations mechanism has been weaponized to create a shadow budget that bypasses regular congressional scrutiny.”

“This system undermines genuine oversight, as lawmakers cannot effectively investigate projects they themselves proposed, turning the budget into a tool for political patronage rather than accountable national planning,” he added.

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