National government budget at a high level. This category is looking at budgets, or the planned government expenditure for the upcoming year, and not the actual expenditure. To satisfy this category, the following minimum criteria must be met:

  • Planned budget divided by government department and sub-department
  • Updated once a year.
  • The budget should include descriptions regarding the different budget sections.

Data Location

Comments

The Ministry of Finance is the body responsible for preparing the budget. It publishes a report for the annual budget that includes general income and expenses for Saudi. However, these reports ( https://www.mof.gov.sa/Arabic/DownloadsCenter/Pages/Budget.aspx ) do not include a government department level breakdown and therefore do not qualify as being available for the purpose of this index.

The data published by the Ministry of Finance is in the form of textual document (see this years budget here: https://www.mof.gov.sa/Arabic/DownloadsCenter/DocLib/%D8%A8%D9%8A%D8%A7%D9%86%20%D9%88%D8%B2%D8%A7%D8%B1%D8%A9%20%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%8A%D8%A9%202015%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%86%D8%B3%D8%AE%D8%A9%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%86%D9%87%D8%A7%D8%A6%D9%8A%D8%A9.pdf), where numbers are approximate and mentioned in the form of "about so and so". The document has section for the total budget, and sections for department, but because the data is not in a table, it is not clear if all departments are mentioned or not, numbers doesn't seem to sum up. As mentioned by the submitted, the data doesn't qualify for the index this year, thus I'd rather set the data existence question to no. Furthermore, the Saudi Data Portal (https://www.data.gov.sa/) doesn't seem to have an updated data for the budget. Only budget from 2 years ago (see here: https://www.data.gov.sa/dataset/government-budget-budget-allocations-first-chapter)

Reviewer comments

There is no detailed budget available to the public. The data on the government portal is no sufficient and not updated. Link to the portal -https://www.data.gov.sa/dataset?query=budget&sort_by=changed&sort_order=DESC

Data Availability

  • N Openly licensed
  • N Is the data available for free
  • N Is the data machine readable
  • N Available in bulk
  • N Is the data provided on a timely and up to date basis
  • N Is data in digital form
  • N Publicly available
  • N Does the data exist
  • N Is the data available online
Key:
  • Yes
  • No
  • Unsure
  • No data

Details

Date the data became available   Unknown
Format of data   Unknown
Reviewer   Mor Rubinstein
Submitters   Tarek Amr
Last modified   Mon Sep 28 2015 05:31:51 GMT+0000 (UTC)