http://blog.yanoak.com/myanmars-government-budget/ Yan Naung Oak | 21 Sep 2016 | 3 min (875 words) Myanmar's Government Budget Lately, I've become really fascinated by sunburst diagrams and was looking for datasets that I could use to visualise in that format. Turns out the Open Myanmar Initiative has collected pretty detailed data on Myanmar's government budget going back till 2012. They have a whole budget explorer site with all sorts of interactive graphs that you should go check out. So I made a visualisation. You can look at the full screen version here.

1. 3/13/2017 Myanmar's Government Budget
http://blog.yanoak.com/myanmars­government­budget/ 1/8
Yan Naung Oak | 21 Sep 2016 | 3 min (875 words)
Lately, I've become really fascinated by sunburst diagrams and was looking for datasets that I
could use to visualise in that format.
Turns out the Open Myanmar Initiative has collected pretty detailed data on Myanmar's
government budget going back till 2012. They have a whole budget explorer site with all sorts of
interactive graphs that you should go check out.
So I made a visualisation. You can look at the full screen version here.
Myanmar's Government Budget
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2. 3/13/2017 Myanmar's Government Budget
http://blog.yanoak.com/myanmars­government­budget/ 2/8
Select financial year: 2017
Data obtained from Open Myanmar Initiative's Budget Explorer.
Acronyms used:
CDC ­ Cantonment and Other Development Committees
NPT ­ Naypyitaw (Myanmar's capital city)
SEE ­ State Economic Enterprise
Myanmar Union Level Budget
Incomes Expenditures
The viz shows how Myanmar's government budget, split into incomes and expenditures, has
been apportioned on three di erent levels. The innermost circle divides the budget into broad
categories of organisations, such as ministries, state economic enterprises (SEEs), and the
central bank. The second circle gets into more details, such as individual ministries and
departments. The outermost circle shows the individual budget entries, such as tax revenues, or
capital expenditures, etc.
The great thing about the sunburst visualisation is how it allows you to see how all individual
little categories and budget items t into the big picture.
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3. 3/13/2017 Myanmar's Government Budget
http://blog.yanoak.com/myanmars­government­budget/ 3/8
After a few seconds of playing around with the viz it you can start identifying some trends, such
as the prominence of State Economic Enterprises in the government budget, or how revenue
from the state enterprises in the energy sector exceed income and property tax revenues.
Trends in the Budget
Because the sunburst visualisation shows everything proportionally as sectors on a circle which
always add up to 360 degrees, you can't really tell at a glance if, in any given year, the total
incomes are higher or lower than the total expenditures. It's also hard to see how the gures
change across the years.
So here's a column chart that shows the yearly incomes and expenditures. Values shown are in
millions of kyats.
Column chart showing yearly incomes and expenditures
Here's the same column chart but with incomes and expenditures stacked into categories.
Stacked column chart showing yearly breakdown of income and expenditure categories
2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017
0
2,000,000
4,000,000
6,000,000
8,000,000
10,000,000
12,000,000
14,000,000
16,000,000
18,000,000
20,000,000
22,000,000
24,000,000
Incomes Expenditures
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4. 3/13/2017 Myanmar's Government Budget
http://blog.yanoak.com/myanmars­government­budget/ 4/8
You can see clearly from the chart that the total expenditures of the ministries and departments
exceed incomes in each year. This is only natural, since the government has to provide a lot of
services and the tax base of the country is not yet well developed. However, you might think
that the state economic enterprises, which enjoy cushy monopolies in a lot industries, should be
turning a pro t. Not quite. It looks like except for the year 2013, expenditures for SEEs exceeded
incomes.
Let's take a closer look at the SEEs under each ministry. Here are the ones for which we have at
least 3 years worth of data, arranged from the ministry with largest budget to the smallest.
SEEs Under Ministry of Energy
SEEs Under Ministry of Electrical Power
SEEs Under Ministry of Finance and Revenue
2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017
0
2,000,000
4,000,000
6,000,000
8,000,000
10,000,000
12,000,000
14,000,000
16,000,000
18,000,000
20,000,000
22,000,000
24,000,000
I - Central Bank I - Ministries and Departments I - SEEs I - SEEs out of Union Funds
I - Others E - Central Bank E - Ministries and Departments E - SEEs
E - SEEs out of Union Funds E - Union Institutions
E - Union Transfers to States and Regions E - Others
2013 2014 2015 2016 2017
millionKyats
0
1,000,000
2,000,000
3,000,000
4,000,000
5,000,000
Incomes Expenditures
2013 2014 2015 2016 2017
millionKyats
0
1,000,000
2,000,000
3,000,000
Incomes Expenditures
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5. 3/13/2017 Myanmar's Government Budget
http://blog.yanoak.com/myanmars­government­budget/ 5/8
SEEs Under Ministry of Communication and IT
SEEs Under Ministry of Industry
SEEs Under Ministry of Mines
SEEs Under Ministry of Environmental Conservation and Forestry
2013 2014 2015 2016 2017
millionKyats
0
200,000
400,000
600,000
800,000
1,000,000
Incomes Expenditures
2013 2014 2015 2016 2017
millionKyats
0
200,000
400,000
600,000
800,000
1,000,000
Incomes Expenditures
2013 2014 2015 2016 2017
millionKyats
0
200,000
400,000
600,000
800,000
1,000,000
Incomes Expenditures
2013 2014 2015 2016 2017
millionKyats
0
100,000
200,000
300,000
400,000
500,000
Incomes Expenditures
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6. 3/13/2017 Myanmar's Government Budget
http://blog.yanoak.com/myanmars­government­budget/ 6/8
SEEs Under Ministry of Rail Transportation
SEEs Under Ministry of Construction
SEEs Under Ministry of Transportation
SEEs Under Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation
2013 2014 2015 2016 2017
millionKyats
0
100,000
200,000
300,000
400,000
500,000
Incomes Expenditures
2013 2014 2015 2016 2017
millionKyats
0
100,000
200,000
300,000
400,000
500,000
Incomes Expenditures
2013 2014 2015
millionKyats
0
100,000
200,000
300,000
400,000
500,000
Incomes Expenditures
2013 2014 2015 2016
millionKyats
0
100,000
200,000
300,000
400,000
500,000
Incomes Expenditures
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7. 3/13/2017 Myanmar's Government Budget
http://blog.yanoak.com/myanmars­government­budget/ 7/8
SEEs Under Ministry of Information
So it looks like the two ministries whose enterprises are consistently pro table are Energy and
Mines. Unsurprisingly. #ResourceCurse.
Whereas, a couple of the ministries's enterprises show losses every year, namely Electric Power,
Finance and Revenue, Industry, Rail, and Information. Now, I'm sure for some of these
ministries, the state economic enterprises rightly have to sell their goods and services to the
public at subsidised rates, which I guess could be a good thing.
But then again, do we really want to squander the money we make from taxes and natural
resources on obsolete government run factories producing shoddy products that no one wants to
buy? Or government run banks that are lagging way behind those in the private sector?
According to this data, the annual government budget de cit is around 4 to 5 trillion kyats (US$
3 to 4 billion). We hardly have any welfare programs. Healthcare spending, for instance, is about
10,000 kyats (US$8) per citizen per year. So these de cits are clearly not happening because the
government is spending too generously on its citizens.
I'd love to take a deeper dive into public policy issues around state economic enterprises but this
post is getting too long and I'll leave that for another post. Meanwhile, you can go read
economist Lex Rie el's research on the same issue.
Technical Stu
2013 2014 2015 2016 2017
millionKyats
0
10,000
20,000
30,000
40,000
50,000
60,000
Incomes Expenditures
2013 2014 2015 2016 2017
millionKyats
0
10,000
20,000
30,000
40,000
50,000
Incomes Expenditures
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8. 3/13/2017 Myanmar's Government Budget
http://blog.yanoak.com/myanmars­government­budget/ 8/8
budget dataviz sunburst government budget
myanmar d3js c3js
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Kerry Roden has a great talk on her implementation of a sunburst diagram for visualising tra c
data to Youtube and how it became such a huge hit that people working in Youtube were even
printing t-shirts with the viz on them.
The D3.js code for the sunburst visualisation was based on Kerry's block. The other charts were
made using C3.js.
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