engleski

Citizen Participation in Fiscal Policy and Budgetary Processes in Croatia

The objective of this paper is to explain the importance of citizen participation in fiscal policy and budgetary processes and to present the results of an online questionnaire conducted at the beginning of 2015 among students in their final years at universities in the Republic of Croatia. Students were selected as representatives of the younger population that were expected to be particularly interested, for they will long have to cope with the consequences of the currently unsound, ineffective and inequitable public finances. The results, however, reveal how little interested and poorly informed the respondents were and, even more, how meagrely they participated in budgetary processes. Although 50% of the respondents thought that it was possible to participate, and 80% that citizens should participate, only 7% had actually tried to. What is more, fewer than 14% of the students regularly kept up with media information about the budget. The knowledge and level of involvement of the respondents were clearly very far from being at a satisfactory level. Because only 16% of the Croatian adult population is educated to tertiary level, it can be assumed that the situation in the population at large is even worse. Although in the last fifteen or so years institutions have been established and numerous measures passed to achieve higher levels of budgetary transparency and greater citizen participation in the budgetary processes, they function at a level well below that which would give grounds for satisfaction.

citizen participation ; fiscal policy ; budgetary process ; Croatia

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