Proceedings of the World Conference on Business, Management, and Economics
Year: 2023
DOI:
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Analysing the budget financing of the Sustainable Development Goals: the case of Slovenia
Žiga Kotnik Maja Klun, Lenart Milan Lah, Tatjana Stanimirović
ABSTRACT:
The success of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) undoubtedly depends on the success of budget allocation by national governments, which are responsible for providing earmarked public funds for sustainable development. The aim of this paper is to statistically analyse the relationships between national budget programmes and SDG performance indicators using the example of Slovenia with the help of Pearson’s bivariate correlation analysis. The calculated correlations were used to examine whether the allocation of budget funds to the individual expenditure areas has an influence on the achievement of the SDGs and whether the use of funds effectively contributes to the achievement of the SDGs. The empirical results show that 24.46% of all budget programmes have a statistically significant relationship to the SDGs, with SDGs 1, 8 and 10 being the most strongly correlated and SDGs 5 and 16 the least correlated. The most effective budget programmes are environmental protection and infrastructure and transport infrastructure, albeit with a limited scope of influence. Intervention programmes and commitments, economic and financial policy, science and information society and payments to the European Union have also proven to be very effective. The budget programmes energy and energy efficiency, pension protection, labour market and working conditions as well as public debt service and financial management show the greatest potential for improvement.
keywords: budget expenditure, efficiency, development-oriented budget policy, sustainable development goals, indicators, Agenda 2030