The Parliamentary Budget Office (UPB) is an independent body established in 2014 tasked with carrying out analyses and checks on the Government’s macroeconomic and public finance forecasts and assessing major legislative measures and compliance with national and European budgetary rules. The UPB contributes to ensuring the transparency and reliability of public accounts, serving Parliament and citizens.
The UPB, established pursuant to the reinforced law on the principle of budget balance and in implementation of the European rules on the new economic governance, is one of the independent fiscal institutions created, in recent times, in numerous OECD countries (Useful links).
The UPB carries out analyses, checks and evaluations regarding:
- macroeconomic and public finance forecasts and the macroeconomic impact of major legislative measures; in particular, it validates the Government’s macroeconomic forecasts contained in the programming documents (Validation letters);
- public finance trends, also by subsector, and compliance with budgetary rules;
- activation and use of certain mechanisms provided for by the new framework of European rules (in particular, the corrective mechanism and the authorization in the event of an exceptional circumstance);
- sustainability of public finances in the long term;
- other economic-financial topics relevant to the aforementioned activities, with particular attention to the dissemination of informational elements in the fields of economics and public finance (Infographic).
The Office operates on the basis of an annual work programme, preparing analyses and reports also at the request of the parliamentary committees responsible for public finance.