The Civil Association for Equality and Justice (ACIJ) presented this week the new version of the National Budget Monitor, with greater interaction capabilities, so that any user, expert or not, can understand how and how all items are financed from the State.
In statements to Noticias Argentinas, the entity ensured that it will also be possible to analyze and compare different periods and administrations because this interface contains information from the last 30 years of the different Argentine governments.
One of the directors of ACIJ, constitutional lawyer Eduardo Ferreyra, stated that this work was done from the perspective that the Association itself has and that it is focused on the "strong equal commitment to the defense and protection of social rights", especially of "vulnerable" groups.
"To protect those rights we need resources. I think it is worth emphasizing it because in the current discourse it seems that there are only individual rights," said the teacher (UBA) and Master in Human Rights and Democratization in Latin America.
On the other hand, he expressed that citizens "have different perceptions and visualizations about moral, political, economic and social issues" and that this discussion is transferred to "how resources are introduced and where the State should invest".
For this reason, the Budget Monitor "was born from the commitment to an era of equality, with a more just future" and in terms of "neutral" applications: "Any person, regardless of their vision of the role of the State or the role of social rights or how these things are financed, can use it," added Ferreyra.
"This tool aims to provide information, data and evidence so that people can support their conclusions, opinions and positions in the most informed way possible. It aims to convey a reality based on data and that each person has the option to create their conclusions and strengthen the public conversation," he stated.
In the same vein, the coordinator of ACIJ's Fiscal Justice program, Alejandro Gaggero, indicated that the "relaunch" of the Monitor (initially founded in 2019) takes place within the framework of the Budgets and Rights Week, which is a series of events that have been held for more than ten years, "with the objective of democratizing the debate on public spending and the budget".
The sociologist and Dr. in Social Sciences (UBA) highlighted that this tool is made "to bring civil society actors closer to the debate on public spending" and even as a call to participate for people "who are not necessarily specialists in the subject", since the Monitor seeks to help its users to "face a series of challenges that the use of budgetary data in Argentina undoubtedly has".
"The inconvenience that a non-specialist person usually faces is that, many times, the information is presented in a difficult way and this complicates the analysis of the available information. We not only have it from personal conviction, but because the Constitution says so, which affirms that those rights exist and that the State cannot carry out things that violate them. Then, the Monitor tries to solve it and facilitates the process of updating that data," explained Gaggero.
On the other hand, he pointed out that economic instability "is usually accompanied by political instability" and this has "strong implications" because the State, in this sense, presents "abrupt transformations" and is reflected in specific issues such as the name of the items and generates problems in traceability: "The data of the item is as information, but many times we must reconstruct those series to avoid the difficulty of economic changes," he added.
To conclude, he highlighted the main novelties that this new version of the Monitor has, on the one hand, the availability of data, and on the other, the expansion of the electronic coverage of data. The Monitor traces data from 1995 to the present and can be used in a comparative way; there are three decades of fiscal policy and there is the possibility of analyzing how the structure of spending has changed with changes in government or economic systems.
Likewise, the tracking of items, generally, usually presents the complete item, however, there are periods in which there could have been a code change, a restructuring and, in those cases, traceability can be lost.
"This is a call for the need for civil society to get involved in the analysis and budgetary distribution. In addition, there are difficulties that are potentiated in Argentina: we have a high level of economic instability and that is an obstacle because it prevents us from one of the central issues, which is to compare data over time. And when we talk about civil society we are talking about journalists, academics, non-specialists in budgetary analysis and members of civil society organizations that, in their daily tasks, can incorporate budget analysis as a tool to get involved in the public debate," they concluded.
Due to inflation, we do not know if that movement in the number is due to a real change or to the effect of the price increase itself.
