Task

Examine whether budget and / or spending data are available for your country. Note: these may have different names (e.g. Enacted Budget)! “Budget” and “spending” are categories rather than necessarily the names of the documents, policy-folks may actually refer to what we refer to here as spending as budgets (with a particular qualifier).

Save your file online somewhere.

Extra Credit

Read the definition of machine readable in the School of Data glossary. Determine whether your budget or spending data is machine readable. You will need machine readable data in the next stage, so if it is non machine readable you may:

• If your data is available on a webpage, but there is no download link – scrape it! Take the introduction to scraping course. (Don’t be afraid – you don’t necessarily need to be able to code!)
• If your data is available in a PDF – take the extracting data from PDFs course. # Note: You may find it easier to submit a Freedom of Information request for machine-readable data. See this example of a successful request for machine-readable data for the EU budget. Don’t forget to ask for any of the supporting documents which help you to understand things like jargon, or how figures were calculated!