Pawn is the basic chess piece we all know. The pawn set stands on the chessboard in front of the king’s and queen’s entourage. Though they seem to be the weakest piece, without them we do not have a kingdom. In the chess game, they fight to protect mostly the king.
Pawm is an acronym noum generated by the first letters of the initiative PAWM–Public Accounts Wealth Monitor. PAWN is a project that aims the development of a web platform about public accounts information specially for journalists and others influencers. Like in chess game, we take ‘pawn/m’ here as the citizen who needs to follow the efforts made in ‘the kingdom’ to set up its citizenship.
Following those efforts means following public accounts. Public accounts summarize the common efforts to produce citizenship, welfare and development in terms of tax paid by each citizen-pawn giving part of their private income, as well as spending by the Public Administration makes.
Still, public accounts results are wealth generation. Albeit classic economics declares government’s expenses as ‘improdutive’, it is beyond ideological interpretations that public services and investments aggregate value to social and economic development. If we take the tax burden percentual for example, it shows the share of private income that passes through public sector as a central condition to allow market relations to happen. This tax burden proportion varies among countries between 30 to more than 50 percent. It is undeniable that to generate wealth is mandatory public reallocation of private income through the statesphere, where public agents operate to collect taxes and to implement many public services and investments under transparency principle and legal rules.
Monitor public accounts from society’s point of vue is to care for timeliness clarity and transparency on public information delivery. Specially public accounts are structured under technical criteria, which must be translate to a non-specialist grammar.
What is PAWN?
PAWN is a project that will aim the development of a web platform about public accounts information specially for journalists and others influencers. The objective is to provide guidelines for its interpretation and dissemination. There will be (i) consolidated information about (i.a) country and state public expenditures focused on key government functionalities (education, health, economic development, social assistance, etc) and (i.b) on tax burden. It will be also available (ii) a wiki collaborative environment for gathering data sources orientations, public finance key concepts and reflections on selected topics from public accounts.
Data will come from official sources (OECD, Eurostat, IFM, WB) mostly based on Classification of Governmental Functions – COFOG data which allows comparisons between different states.
The project schedule will be introduced during October.
