Budget openness not enough

On Friday, more than 100 central departments made public their 2017 annual budgets, with the Ministry of Education among those doing so first.

That a growing number of government departments are disclosing their annual budget information marks concrete progress toward building a transparent government budget.

But despite the tangible progress that has been made in recent years, the budget transparency of public departments is still far from satisfactory. For various reasons, a large number of public departments that should make public their budgets fail to do so, and no targeted indexes are introduced to the budgets of subprojects under a key project.