A province that designs and implements a $1,02 trillion infrastructure plan operated for a full fiscal year without an approved budget. That coexistence encapsulates governance in Buenos Aires: real capacity to plan and deliver in strategic sectors — led by infrastructure and digitalisation — alongside persistent weaknesses in integration at the centre of government, continuity of the budget cycle and publication of consistent results for each public policy. The Province has the parts. The system to integrate them is still pending. This structural audit assesses provincial capacity to plan, finance, coordinate, implement, oversee and improve public policies between 2018 and 2025, focusing on 2024-2026. The evidence cut-off is declared: provincial and national primary sources, with municipal transparency measured by ASAP as of March 2025. Where the 2018-2025 series lacked a consistent reconstruction, that absence is recorded; fictitious continuity has no place in the method.
The fiscal picture · stable dollar-denominated debt, a discontinuous budget cycle
Buenos Aires's dollar-denominated public debt stock closed 2021 at USD 11.355 million, reached a low of USD 11.001 million in March 2023 and rose to USD 11.633 million in September 2025 (Ministerio de Economía PBA). This evolution does not in itself show an abrupt jump in the hard-currency debt stock. Nor does it establish solvency, liquidity or debt-servicing capacity: the Province remains exposed to the exchange rate, refinancing of maturing debt and the intergovernmental fiscal relationship.
| Year | Budget framework | Fiscal data for the period |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | Law 15.394 · approved budget | Dollar-denominated debt stock · USD 11.001 million in March 2023, the low point of the period's range (Ministerio de Economía PBA) |
| 2024 | Decree 3681/24 · extension of the 2023 framework | Execution under an extended budget |
| 2025 | Full fiscal year under an extended budget | Stock of USD 11.633 million as of September 2025 · municipal security funds of up to $71.500 million |
| 2026 | Law 15.557 · return to the regular cycle | Approved budget |
The discontinuous budget cycle
Operating for an entire fiscal year under an extended budget does not prevent management or evaluation of results. It reduces legislative updating of priorities and amounts, weakens spending predictability and makes comparisons between authorisation, execution and results less transparent. Córdoba, Santa Fe and Mendoza approved their 2026 budgets on time. The difference requires an institutional explanation as well as a technical one.
Security · reported improvement, incomplete traceability
The provincial government reported 751 intentional homicides in 2025 and a rate of 4,3 per 100.000 inhabitants, presented as the lowest in recent decades according to the official yearbook. If the trend holds across a consistent and verifiable series, the progress is real. In 2025, the Province also made available municipal security-strengthening funds of up to $71.500 million. The funding exists.
The missing series needed to audit the trend
The main crimes over 2018-2025 lack a public, consistent series consolidated through a single provincial access point. Auditing a trend requires that series; managing security requires a unified dashboard covering local prevention, crime, 911 dispatch, criminal investigation and the prison system. Today, the Province announces resources with a robustness that public measurement of results has yet to achieve.
Education. The asymmetry hidden by the average
Aprender 2023 shows two simultaneous and opposing trends for the Province. An average indicator would smooth them out to the point of erasing them.
| Subject · primary education, low-performance group | 2021 | 2023 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Language | 43,2% | 32,7% | Improvement of 10,5 points in two years |
| Mathematics | 46,0% | 48,4% | Decline of 2,4 points |
Mathematics insufficiently under control
Almost half of primary school pupils in Buenos Aires fall below the expected basic level in Mathematics, a fundamental area of learning for subsequent educational pathways (Aprender 2023). The information exists and the Province publishes it: 2025 education bulletins with 2023-2024 tables and 2017-2024 trends in grade progression and repetition. That statistical strength is real. What remains is to turn it into a decision-making dashboard, with differentiated targets by subject, territory and socio-educational level, and visible consequences for those responsible for management.
Infrastructure. The sector with the best management architecture
The 2024-2027 Strategic Infrastructure Plan displays one of the Province's clearest public management architectures: defined objectives, explicit prioritisation criteria and an investment scale unusual in other areas — $1,02 trillion, 7.000 projects, 17,5 million beneficiaries, 180.000 direct and indirect jobs (Ministerio de Infraestructura PBA). The Observatorio de Obras y Servicios Públicos has a founding charter, internal rules and working groups: a concrete pursuit of transparency and technical interaction with third parties. The operational question is different: whether that architecture can be sustained, measured and transferred as an institutional model to other policies.
The best policy and the most persistent deficit, in the same sector
The 60,5% sewerage coverage according to census data officially cited in 2025, considered alongside territorial heterogeneity across the 135 municipalities, leads to an uncomfortable conclusion: a documented infrastructure architecture coexists with a basic services deficit that remains persistent and territorially unequal within the Province.
Municipal coordination · a real information base, highly unequal capacities
The 135 municipalities of Buenos Aires differ in scale, capacity and fiscal structure. The information base exists: the transfers portal publishes data from 2018 onwards, the 2024 municipal finance report records current revenue of $7,26 trillion, and revenue sharing distributes 16,14% of the shareable pool among the districts (Ministerio de Economía PBA). What is missing, with the same regularity, is consistent institutional capacity.
| Level of fiscal transparency · ASAP, March 2025 | Proportion of municipalities |
|---|---|
| Strict or high | 42,2% |
| Zero | 17% |
| Intermediate levels | The remainder of the total of 135 municipalities |
Municipal heterogeneity as a structural warning
Day-to-day urban security, primary care, territorial maintenance and local tax administration are managed at the municipal level; much of the citizen experience is shaped there. In that context, that 42,2% is a structural warning. Without a leap in the quality of municipal management, provincial policy will continue to come up against the territory's institutional geography.
2026 budget · four official timetables
| Province | Documented status of the 2026 Budget |
|---|---|
| Córdoba | Passed by the Legislature on 18 December 2025 |
| Santa Fe | Final passage by the Senate on 18 December 2025 |
| Mendoza | Law 9.681 promulgated on 16 December 2025 |
| Buenos Aires | Law 15.557 approved for 2026, following the 2025 fiscal year under an extended budget |
The comparison is limited: it establishes dates of passage or promulgation, not management quality or superiority among provinces. It does, however, place Buenos Aires's discontinuity in context alongside three jurisdictions that finalised their 2026 framework before the start of the fiscal year. Buenos Aires publishes fiscal inputs, and the PEI documents an infrastructure architecture with objectives, scale and prioritisation criteria. The remaining gap is to turn that information into a continuous framework for performance accountability — the standard that Criterion 13 calls tracing a policy from end to end.
The most cost-effective reform is institutional
The Province needs fewer new programmes and more of an overarching leadership layer that integrates budget, data, execution, risks and results into a single decision-making cycle.
Buenos Aires already has the scale, tools and information to govern better than it does. It lacks integration.