Budget literacy: A study on the municipal assembly members of the Aegean region

The concept of participatory budgeting is a concept that gains importance every day, including the involvement of the public in the budget processes. Budget literacy also aims to involve the public in the budget processes, as in participatory budgeting, and it also aims to question these processes and take an active role in the budget processes. Particularly in local governments, the involvement of the public in the budget processes and their questioning of these processes have an important place in increasing the efficiency in the use of budget resources. Questioning the budget processes will enable the budget control mechanism to work more actively. At the same time, people and institutions in charge of the budget processes will act more carefully because they know that they are audited. For this reason, the concept of budget literacy emerges as an important concept. The aim of our study is to evaluate the perceptions of municipal council members, one of the local government bodies, about budget literacy. Due to the lack of sufficient resources on budget literacy in the literature, the concept of budget literacy has been emphasized. As the concept of budget appears as an important concept, the concept of budget literacy is also an important concept in terms of more active functioning and auditing of the budget processes, the conscious action of people and organizations taking an active role in the budget, and the participation of the public in this process. The reason why the concept of budget literacy is realized on the members of the municipal council is that they take an active role in the local budget processes. While the municipal council members are discussing the municipal budgets; It is one of the municipal organs that take an active role in the preparation, implementation and audit stages of the budget. Due to their active role in the budget process, the perceptions of the city council members about the budget literacy were evaluated with the survey study prepared by us. Our work consists of three parts. In the first part of the study, the concept of budget literacy; financial literacy, tax literacy and participatory budgeting concepts have been tried to be explained with the support of and explained by associating them with budget principles. In the second part, information about the duties and responsibilities of the municipal council members, which constitute the sample of our study, the municipal organs and the general financial and administrative structures of the local governments are given. In the last part of the study, there is a literature review on the concepts of financial literacy, tax literacy, financial literacy and budget literacy by giving place to the purpose and importance of the study. At the same time, necessary analyzes were made with the survey data using the SPSS package program on the municipal councilors in the provinces of İzmir, Manisa, Aydın, Uşak, Kütahya and Afyon in the Aegean Region. In line with the analyzes made, the findings were mentioned and suggestions were tried to be made on this subject.