Government Budgets and Human Rights

Abstract

Fiscal resources, as well as legal infrastructure, are required to fulfill human rights obligations. This emphasizes the importance of fiscal perspective for realizing human rights, and it finds a soul in the budget as concepts of public expenditures and revenues. Budgets, as the government's most important fiscal plan, outline how resources will be allocated. In this regard, budgets play a vital role for the realizing of human rights. Human rights-based budgeting approach has become increasingly popular in recent years. This technique considers human rights obligations for allocating resources; hence, it assists in defining public expenditures. This study focused on human rights from a fiscal perspective and the causality relationship between public expenditures, and human rights was investigated by employing the Dumitrescu-Hurlin panel causality test for the period 1995-2017 in 26 OECD countries, based on the assumption that public expenditures are an important instrument in realizing human rights. Findings reveal a bidirectional causality between public spending and human rights.