Database on fiscal institutions

The Commission services have compiled a broad set of information on national independent fiscal institutions (IFI) in the EU countries through a comprehensive survey launched in 2006 across Member States. This survey compiled information related to the main characteristics of these domestic public bodies covering their mandates and functions, the composition of their governing boards, their formal status vis-à-vis government or parliament, and their media visibility and influence on public debates on fiscal policy.

In recent years the database has increasingly focused on the so-called 'core IFIs' (i.e. the IFIs endowed with a formal mandate derived from EU legislation), as well as a small number of 'non-core IFIs'(i.e. institutions that carry-out IFI-specific tasks).

As of 2015, as part of the new Fiscal Governance Database methodology, the Directorate General for Economic and Financial Affairs introduced a Scope Index of Fiscal Institutions (SIFI) that aims to measure the breadth of tasks discharged by IFIs. The SIFI index is calculated only for 'core IFIs', based on information reported by these institutions themselves. A typology defining six separate groupings of tasks constitute the SIFI index (the basis for this typology being described in Chapter II of the 2014 Report on Public Finances in EMU): (1) monitoring of compliance with fiscal rules; (2) macroeconomic forecasting; (3) budgetary forecasting and policy costing; (4) sustainability assessment; (5) promotion of fiscal transparency; and (6) normative recommendations on fiscal policy.