On 17 and 18 June, the 15th Meeting of the Latin American Results-Based Budgeting Network was held at the headquarters of the Spanish Institute of Fiscal Studies. The event was attended by a wide diversity of Latin American authorities and international experts on taxation and public budgets.
The inaugural session was attended by the Spanish Secretary of State for Budgets and Expenditure, María José Gualda Romero; in addition to Edwin Lau, Director of the Budget and Public Expenditure Division at the OECD, Alain Cuenca, General Director of the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IEF); and Sonia González, Head of the Governance Area at the EUROsociAL+ Programme.
EUROsociAL supported two discussion panels at the meeting as part of its work on budgeting through public finance lines. The first of the panels dealt with progress in the region on budgets with a gender focus, which included the experiences of Uruguay and Argentina, with which the Programme collaborates. The second panel addressed the relationship between the 2030 Agenda and public budgets. This included a keynote speech by the economics professor at the Complutense University, Jose Antonio Alonso, who explored the main challenges facing the region in terms of mobilising domestic resources to finance the SDG agenda, and the role that companies and other non-public actors must play to achieve it.
During the event, there were other high-level panels on results-based budgeting, the development of public-private partnerships, the digitisation of budget administrations and the importance of the link between planning and budgeting. The panels combined analytical presentations by international experts such as Carola Pessino, IDB senior expert on tax matters, and Karen Suarez, expert on gender budgeting by EUROsociAL+ with a country-by-country presentation of specific cases and problems, by their respective budgetary authorities including Luis Reyes, Budget Director in the Dominican Republic and Michael Borchardt, Director of the National Budget at the Uruguayan Ministry of Economy and Finance, among others.
The meeting was successful and led to several agreements. Including the fact that the new Presidency of the Network will be held by Paraguay, as represented by Teodora Recalde, Paraguayan Director of Budgets and the Vice Presidency by Guillermo Valentino, on behalf of the Argentine Ministry of Finance. In addition, a new working group was created within the network on budgets with a gender focus that will be coordinated by the EUROSociAL+ Programme in collaboration with the OECD.
Finally, it should be pointed out that the Results-Based Budgeting Network is a well-established network with a successful track record. It was established fifteen years ago and is part of the “Community of Professionals and Experts in Latin America and the Caribbean in Management for Development Results”. It encompasses more than 10,000 Latin American public officials and is supported by collaborations with institutions such as the World Bank, the OECD and ECLAC/ILPES.
