Well-being and the Budget

The Well-being Framework and the analysis of the accompanying dashboard features at key points in the Budget process annually. This includes at the National Economic Dialogue, in the Summer Economic Statement and in Budget Day documentation. This supplements existing work to provide an additional holistic understanding of quality of life issues into the discussions and publications which surround Budget decision-making.

For example for Budget 2025 this included:

• National Economic Dialogue
• Summer Economic Statement
• Budget 2025: Beyond GDP – Quality of Life Assessment.

The Department of Public Expenditure, Infastructure, Public Services, Reform and Digitalisation has published a working paperoutlining how a well-being perspective can be developed within the context of the budgetary process, and, in particular, support the development of a cross-governmental description of resource allocation decisions as a complement to the existing approach to presenting such information.

Budget Tagging uses the dimensions of the Well-being Framework to present a high-level summary of the ways in which public money supports and enhances people’s lives. It does so by mapping current and capital public expenditure to the outcomes described by the Well-being Framework.

This initiative, led by the Department of Public Expenditure, Infrastructure, Public Service Reform and Digitalisation, worked with all other Departments and Offices to identify policy goals for each sub-head of the Budget, and to match it with the most appropriate dimension(s) from the Well-being Framework.

Figure 1 - Map of current expenditure by Dimension (Source: Budget 2024 – Revised Estimates Volume 2024 – Enhancing the Well-being of People Living in Ireland Working Paper No.5).

Figure 2 - Map of capital expenditure by Dimension (Source: Budget 2024 – Revised Estimates Volume 2024 – Enhancing the Well-being of People Living in Ireland Working Paper No.5).

The benefits associated with tagging public expenditure include:

• Increasing transparency about the use of limited public resources. By bringing a set of policies from a range of departments, offices and agencies under a single tag helps to focus attention on how public resources are being used to address cross-cutting policy challenges.

This could enhance understanding of the progress that is being made to address these challenges and support the identification of potential opportunities for co-operation and coordination between the various organisations that are focussed on addressing such policy challenges.

• Informing the broader discourse around budgetary decisions. By aggregating resources in a way that describes the balance of resource allocation across the policy environment as a whole, it may provide an opportunity to introduce an additional strategic aspect to budgetary discussions in addition to institutional-level considerations.

• Enhancing the analysis that informs the resource allocation decision process. In particular, the data associated with budget tagging may form the basis of programme evaluations, reviews of public expenditure or other pieces of policy analysis.

For Budget 2025 the Department has published a paper on Enhancing the Well-being of People Living in Ireland Working Paper No.6.

For Budget 2024, the Department published two papers:

1. Budget 2024 – Enhancing the Well-being of People Living in Ireland which provides a cross-governmental look at selected measures announced in Budget 2024, and;

2. Budget 2024 – Revised Estimates Volume 2024 – Enhancing the Well-being of People Living in Ireland Working Paper No.5l which provides a high-level, cross-governmental description of the total allocation of resources as presented in the Revised Estimates Volume for Public Services 2024.

These papers will help discussions on how a well-being perspective might impact and inform the allocation of resources.