To generate the political support and public ownership required to address major fiscal challenges, the public will need to understand these challenges. That means communicating better and explaining the consequences of inaction. This chapter explores some of the difficulties involved in communicating about public finances clearly. It looks at best practices and sets out ways to build on these.
The People and the Budget
Empowering Public Understanding of Public Finances
Abstract
Stronger communication for better fiscal debate: Clear communication about budgetary pressures is essential for building political will, maintaining trust in institutions and fostering understanding and a sense of ownership among citizens around difficult fiscal decisions. Yet, this has become harder in a fragmented media landscape marked by shifting information habits and rising disinformation.
The communications challenge: Public finance discussions are hindered by fundamental barriers: the incomprehensibility of “big numbers,” the difficulty of making them relatable to daily life, and the “curse of knowledge”, where experts fail to bridge the gap with the public. Overcoming this requires a strategic shift toward plain speaking, putting data into perspective, and making abstract figures relatable to households.
Embedding a culture: Evidence from institutions that are most effectively communicating about public finances shows that communication cannot be an afterthought. Success requires embedding a communications culture, where openness with the media and accessible writing are prioritised alongside technical rigour.
Seven steps to improvement: Building on cognitive science and best practices from these leading institutions, the report identifies seven steps for better communication. These include embedding a communications culture, opening up to media, using plain language, layering content for different audiences, leveraging social media, making creative use of visuals, and rigorously tracking communications impact to refine communications in future.
When public debt is high and budgets are under pressure, strategic communication is vital. People need to understand what is going on with their country’s finances and why governments need to make certain choices. Clear communication is a key driver of trust, as evidenced in the OECD Trust Survey (OECD, 2024[1]). It helps cut through the noise and makes it easier for everyone to see the bigger picture. It also gives people confidence that decisions are being taken for the right reasons and an understanding of the consequences of inaction.
Insights into what works and what does not work among existing practices can be drawn from institutions already making advanced efforts in this space. For example, IFIs have a natural role in communicating public finances as independent, non‑partisan institutions focused on budgetary analysis. As they are central to this effort, they offer valuable lessons and best practices from which the wider fiscal ecosystem can learn.
In terms of communication practices, these institutions fall into three categories:
institutions with limited professional communications and limited impact.
institutions that have developed a solid platform for communications, yet that still have relatively limited communications impact.
institutions that go the distance: that is, as well as having built their capacity to spread, promote, and track their work, they also appear to have generated substantial media impact.
The OECD Fiscal Advocacy Index, presented in Chapter 5 of this report, can be used to assess the differences further. While the first two dimensions of the Index focus on independence and analytical focus (see also the online appendix “The Fiscal Advocacy Index”), the third and fourth dimensions of the Index are most relevant here. The third measures the communications apparatus built up by different IFIs. It considers whether they have dedicated communications experts, their use of press releases, briefings, embargoed reports and so on. The fourth dimension is even more relevant. It assesses communications impact. It looks at the extent to which these institutions feature in the national media debate. It also considers how much they have entered public thinking in terms of their online activity.
The results of the index show a number of institutions generating substantial communications impact. Six institutions stand out as generating substantial communications impact as well as having a robust communications apparatus (Figure 3.1). These include the Netherlands’ CPB, the United States CBO, the Canadian PBO, the United Kingdom OBR, the Spanish Independent Authority for Fiscal Responsibility (AIReF) and the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council. Each of these six institutions alone generate a communications impact that is at least twice – and up to three times – the impact of each of the next 14 individually.
The top six have strikingly similar tools to help communicate their work. They all have communications policies, strategies, press releases and briefings. Most issue embargoed reports (five out of the six institutions) as well as publishing blogs and in academic journals (four). All of them use social media to promote their work. As well as that, all see their leadership regularly appearing on TV, radio, and at conferences. Aside from Ireland, they all have access to at least one communications expert. To track impact, they all keep sight of media mentions and web traffic though the smaller institutions near the top tend not to track parliamentary mentions or regularly survey their stakeholders.
And yet differences in communications apparatus are unlikely to explain the differences in impact alone. The next 14 institutions in Figure 3.1 have many, if not all, of the features present in the six that are generating the highest impact. Therefore, it seems clear that communications impact is unlikely to be down to any single communications tool. Instead, it would appear to depend on the interaction between several crucial facets.
2024 OECD Fiscal Advocacy Index communications dimensions (maximum = 2)
Note: The figure shows the results for the communications apparatus and communications impact dimensions of the 2024 OECD Fiscal Advocacy Index as set out in Chapter 5 and the online appendix “The Fiscal Advocacy Index”. Impact is measured using three of the main news sites in each country (media mentions and share of budgetary coverage) as well as using information from Google trends on the scale and regularity of user searches for each IFI in their national context.
Source: 2024 OECD Fiscal Advocacy Index.
3.1.1. Communications: A whole greater than the sum of its parts
Communications impact can be explored using a regression analysis based on several key features. First, the analysis assesses communications impact based on specific features of an institution’s communications apparatus: the presence of dedicated communications staff, communication strategies, the use of press releases, and so on. Second, it looks at impact in terms of the institution’s overall communications apparatus as well as their independence and analytical focus.1 Third, it considers the combined effect of these three dimensions.
The findings suggest that it is the joint effect of all three dimensions is important in explaining an institution’s communications impact (Figure 3.2). That is, they need to be independent, analytically focused, and armed with tools to communicate their work effectively if they are to succeed in influencing the national debate. Put another way, the findings suggest that to generate impact, agencies should ideally have all these complementary capabilities in place and functioning well: independence, analytical focus and a communications apparatus. When all is in place, the institution’s communication impact appears to become more than the sum of the institution’s parts.
This has some profound implications. It suggests that bodies communicating public finance issues need to take a holistic approach to achieving their communications aims. Weak independence or a lack of focus on areas of major importance seem likely to hamper any communications effort, no matter how well designed it is. Institutions should be equipped to produce analysis on key areas, such as long-term fiscal sustainability analysis, a focus on key fiscal risks, or producing costings of major government programmes and election platforms.
Coefficients and confidence intervals
Note: The figure shows the estimated coefficients and confidence intervals for various predictors of an IFI’s communications impact.
Source: Author’s elaboration based on the 2024 OECD Fiscal Advocacy Index (online appendix “The Fiscal Advocacy Index”).
Ensuring that people can trust and understand information about public finances is difficult. It requires ongoing efforts to make this information clearer and a concerted and widespread effort to improve how fiscal experts and key decision makers speak about public finances. It may also require OECD countries to reinforce the very institutions that are key to communicating fiscal developments in an objective and transparent manner.
IFIs have a critical role in this regard. They are tasked with analysing public finances. Furthermore, their role in bringing fiscal issues into the light is an important and evolving one. Ensuring that these institutions are well founded and adequately resourced will play a key role in immunising public finances from the risks of highly polarised debates and misleading information.
The rest of this chapter looks at fundamental challenges to communicating budgetary issues and how institutions can foster well-informed public discussion about public finances, drawing on new insights from where it is being done well.
When it comes to communicating about public finances, there are some fundamental challenges. Three major hurdles include big numbers, a lack of salience, and the persistent knowledge gap between experts and the public.
3.2.1. Big numbers
A key feature of discussions around public finances is the role of big numbers. There is seldom a budgetary discussion that avoids the mention of hundreds of millions, if not billions or trillions. These amounts go beyond most people’s conventional understanding of quantities.
The ability to conceive of scales far removed from the “human scale” people experience every day is a unifying challenge. When it comes to distances, tests suggest that people’s conception of scale fails quickly as units go beyond 10s into 100s and 1000s (Tretter, Jones and Minogue, 2006[2]).
Furthermore, numeracy skills are often limited to begin with. This is borne out by the OECD's large-scale surveys PISA and PIAAC, which provide measures of numeracy among 15-year-olds and the adult population. Furthermore, gaps between high and low performers in terms of numeracy not only persist as people age; they often widen (OECD, 2023[3]).
With public finances, people’s difficulty with big numbers is often exploited. To make figures sound larger, they are expressed in cash terms. As fiscal measures are often repeated over multiple years, the amounts are frequently cumulated to make them sound bigger. These tactics may be used to make debt levels sound scarier, for instance, or to make a multi-year investment plan sound more ambitious.
What is lacking in these discussions is a sense of context or scaling. Without adequate scaling, the public can be bemused by exceptionally large fiscal numbers.
Writing on number “numbness”, Hofstadter (1982[4]) raises the concern that relatively few people really know the difference between 1 million and 1 billion. As an example, he mentions an Associated Press article on the US federal debt ceiling going up to USD 1.143 trillion – this was 1982 – which then erroneously cites the latest debt figure as being a far less troubling USD 1 070 241 000. Given that tests show even gifted students and experts routinely failing to identify distances in billions of meters accurately to within one-tenth or ten times the correct distance, this suspicion is probably justified (Tretter, Jones and Minogue, 2006[2]).2
One prominent study tested a small number of people on their understanding of large numbers with striking results (Landy, Silbert and Goldin, 2013[5]). The study found that roughly half of participants put 1 million as halfway along a line running from 1 000 to 1 billion rather than 1/1 000th of the way (see illustration in Figure 3.3). The problem seems to be that those failing the task tend to think of “thousands”, “millions” and “billions” as having a uniform spacing in magnitude. This misconception may be due to how people write numbers as words, but it seems to also influence how they interpret numbers more generally, including when written as numerals.
Note: The study investigates how adults estimate the magnitude of big numbers using a number line estimation task. Participants were asked to place numbers ranging from 1 thousand to 1 billion on a line marked with the endpoints labelled accordingly.
Source: Adapted from Landy, Silbert, and Goldin (2013[5]).
Big numbers are in and of themselves a problem, making it difficult to comprehend what exactly is involved. In turn, this can cause people to disengage from the information being relayed. It can produce numbness, apathy, and a resistance to information.
To counter this, a clear strategy is needed to illuminate the figures in a more meaningful way.
3.2.2. A lack of salience
A second fundamental communications challenge around public finances is a lack of salience. That is, budgets frequently relate to areas that people are unfamiliar with, where they have little sense of the context involved and find it difficult to parse meaningful developments.
For example, few people would know offhand what the annual budget is for military spending, let alone the marginal impact of another billion, if allocated. This is a case in point for how the public finances often refer to large areas that span entire populations. For example, rather than relating things to a person’s own tax circumstances, experts often discuss a tax system. Instead of focusing on an individual’s benefits, experts might frame the discussion in terms of overall social security spending.
There is a risk that discussions become intractable, focused on remote systems and allocations that bear little relevance to people’s own lives.
This lack of salience also arises in terms of how public finances are evolving. An important example is how people understand the costs of “standing still”. New spending is often presented as being additional. It implies more services or supports being provided. Yet, the reality is that some increase in spending is typically needed just to stand still. The increase in cash terms might sound big, but if it fails to keep pace with price and wage increases, not to mention the demands of a larger population, it might, in fact, mean that public services are being wound down in real terms rather than expanded.
There is a temptation for policymakers to play on this lack of salience. For instance, rather than presenting things as genuine real cuts in spending, it can be tempting to pretend that a nominal increase is a signal of support for a certain area. This can add to the problem of lack of trust in conversations around public finances as well as the lack of understanding.
The lack of salience is also relevant where there are major inter-generational challenges at stake. Assessing what today’s policies will mean in 50 years’ time is a complex analytical challenge. Communicating what it means is a further complication. Many people will struggle to see the relevance to their own lives. This matters when it comes to the major challenges facing OECD countries in terms of public finances. The pressures of ageing populations and multi-year public spending initiatives all fall prey to this lack of salience.
3.2.3. The “curse of knowledge”
As with many things, the gap in competence between experts and the public they are seeking to inform can be worsened by bad communications.
This raises a third fundamental challenge with how the public finances are communicated: the “curse of knowledge”. That is, the tendency for experts to assume others have already attained some mastery over subjects they find easy to understand. As Pinker (2014, p. 61[6]) explains:
“it simply doesn't occur to the writer that her readers don't know what she knows – that they haven't mastered the patois of her guild, can't divine the missing steps that seem too obvious to mention, have no way to visualize a scene that to her is as clear as day. And so she doesn't bother to explain the jargon, or spell out the logic, or supply the necessary detail.”
The curse of knowledge is a pervasive problem. It makes mountains of text impenetrable. It wastes countless hours for those having to navigate needlessly difficult language. And because it is usually unintentional, it can be difficult for those communicating to override. Indeed, Pinker describes it as the single best explanation of “why good people write bad prose”.
To empower citizens with an understanding of the public finances, it is vital to recognise the limitations with how these issues are communicated. There needs to be a concerted effort to break down the walls built between experts and non-experts. This will help ensure communications are more accessible to a broader audience. Only then can the political will for action be generated.
3.3.1. Insights from selected good practices
Raising people’s understanding of public finances is not easy. However, there are some leading examples from the OECD.
Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB)
The Netherlands CPB has seen its approach to communications undergo important reforms in recent years. It has taken big steps towards developing a broader communications culture within the organisation as a whole. As well as that it has adopted a more forward-looking approach to communications.
The CPB takes a holistic approach to its communications. It instils in its staff an understanding of how central communications are to its work from day one rather than having communications experts liaise with analytical staff at the end of projects. This starts at the recruitment stage. A core competency expected of new staff is that their communications are highly accessible. On starting, new analysts receive communications training one day per week over eight to ten weeks. In this time, the communications team covers what outputs have produced more impact and positive outcomes in the past. Staff look at how to structure research to communicate it effectively. They also go through basics such as formulating clear sentences and ways to visualise material more effectively. Part of its aim is to have material with easy-to-find takeaways, clear visuals, and a strong narrative.
Source: CPB (2022[7]), Infographic on economic developments, 2022-2025. Adapted to English.
There are several examples of how this approach has yielded benefits. Work on charting public debt adopted a creative approach. To highlight the extent to which debt had risen, staff charted the national debt as extending outside the margins of a page containing other visuals (Figure 3.4). This generated amusement and substantial media discussion. Elsewhere, work on VAT on fruit and vegetables saw a relatively junior researcher involved in the project communicating the content so clearly that they were invited to speak at parliament. Part of the success of this project was its ability to show a more human side to public finance issues. These examples show just some of the ways that embedding communications has helped foster more creativity and clarity in the CPB’s communications.
In evolving its communications approach, the CPB has also switched from a “reactive” to a “proactive” approach. Rather than waiting for researchers to develop outputs and responding to the latest fiscal events as they arise, the CPB communications team gets involved in report production at the early and middle stages. It also tries to anticipate key emerging themes or areas of focus. As part of this shift in mindset, the CPB assesses the sensitivities and potential timing considerations that might require it to calibrate its approach to ensure better impact.
Another aspect of the CPB’s embedded communications culture is that it is remarkably open. All of its staff are free to talk to journalists on background, off the record. It makes all staff contact details available online to support this. The CPB sees this approach as essential to fostering and maintaining healthy relationships with the media.
All this effort has paid off. The CPB has the strongest communications impact measured out of all of the IFIs considered in the Fiscal Advocacy Index. It was cited in one in five articles on fiscal topics by the top three Dutch news sites in 2023. In the context of domestic searches, it is also the most-Googled of all IFIs. Indeed, hardly a week goes by where it does not feature in people’s search activity in some significant volume.
Canadian Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO)
The Canadian PBO is another example of an IFI with highly evolved communications practices embedded throughout the institution. Like the Netherlands CPB, the PBO views its ability to communicate material clearly as crucial to its work. Its leadership cites the need for “sound, thorough, and credible analysis” as an essential condition. However, they note that “if we can’t explain something, we’re doing it wrong”.
The PBO has embraced openness in similar ways to the CPB. It has an “open-by-default” policy. Staff are allowed to speak on background with journalists, and its leadership is active in cultivating relationships with the press.
The PBO coaches its staff on plain speaking. To help with this, the PBO uses software tools such as “Antidote” that highlight redundancies, repetition, dull verbs, and other stylistic features of writing as well as more conventional errors. This is used not just for publications but for internal communications as well.
The PBO layers its communications to make work accessible to different audiences. Each report has an executive summary and is accompanied by a “highlights” document. This summarises the report in two to four paragraphs. The highlights document is used internally to help design press releases and as a refresher tool when speaking to parliament or media.
Infographics are regularly used to summarise the PBO’s reports. One recent example relates to spending by the Navy. The PBO analysed potential costs over the fleet’s full life cycle from developing the ships to acquiring them, operating them and disposing of them. It illustrated the stages of development in a useful chart in the main report (Figure 3.5). It expanded on this with an infographic showing the time spent at each stage and associated costs. The reporting generated substantial media reaction and led to renewed debate about procurement outcomes.
Source: (Busby, Kho and Penney, 2022[8]).
Irish Fiscal Advisory Council
Similar to the Netherlands CPB and the Canadian PBO, albeit with smaller resources, the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council embeds strong communications throughout its activities.
The Council emphasises communications as a key priority for its staff. This starts early: clear communications are weighted heavily when grading potential recruits. The Council conducts annual internal training sessions on effective writing and presenting, drawing on its own past experiences with publications. In addition, all its staff undertake professional media training with a focus on media engagement.
The Council has cultivated ongoing relationships with the media, regularly engaging with journalists on background. It sees this as important for building and maintaining relationships vital to its success.
The Council also uses social media strategically. As well as using it to promote its work, it uses it to intervene on topical issues at key junctures. When areas covered by its past analysis feature in the national debate, it posts content on its past work to help inform the discussion.
One standout example of the Council’s ability to capture the public’s attention is its coverage of ageing pressures. The Council condensed some of the analysis in its Long-term Sustainability Report to a more human level by showing the implications for individual taxpayers. It estimated that workers on average wages would have to pay an extra EUR 1 000 social contributions annually just to finance the larger number of people reaching retirement age. It estimated an additional EUR 800 would be required if pension age increases did not go ahead (Figure 3.6). This analysis generated substantial and sustained media debate on the implications of pensions policy for different generations of taxpayers.
EUR increase in social contributions in today's terms based on policy options
Note: Figures are based on package 3 and 4 of the Pension Commission’s (2021) options using social contributions (PRSI) rate increases out to 2050.
Source: Irish Fiscal Advisory Council (2022[9]).
Another notable activity is the way in which the Council reviews its work. It assesses its main reports based on multiple readability metrics, tracks media impact carefully, and records examples of text that produced a desirable or undesirable impact. The goal is to continuously learn from its work and improve its communications efforts.
Despite its smaller resources, the Council has managed to have a prominent influence on the national debate. It enjoys a strong media presence shaping public opinion (Nicol et al., 2021[10]) and features in almost one-third of articles covering fiscal issues.
Insights from the case studies
It is important to note that both the Netherlands CPB and the Canadian PBO have mature communications. As part of the CPB’s change in approach, its communications function expanded to six people. This is the size of some smaller institution’s entire staff complement. This level of resourcing allows it delegate tasks substantially. For instance, one person focuses on outward engagements, another on monitoring communications and impact, another on more strategic issues, another on the CPB’s website. The Canadian PBO also has experts within its staffing.
Many institutions will not be able to match the resources of the Netherlands CPB and Canadian PBO. However, they can learn from their experiences in terms of what has worked. They can also draw on the experiences of smaller institutions that have no staff dedicated to communications – such as the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council – but that have advanced communications practices. Part of this success can be tied to its efforts to establish independence, focus analysis on key areas, and embed a strong communications culture among analysts.
As well as embedding a culture that promotes clear communications within their organisations, these case studies reveal some patterns.
Learning continuously: These institutions tend to put an emphasis on learning from past publications to improve how they communicate, build on things that worked, and avoid past mistakes.
Being open: These institutions tend to be remarkably open. That is, they engage actively with the press on background. Indeed, they often view this as a core part of their role.
Making content accessible and more human: There is often a conscious effort to put a more human face on budgetary themes. This is useful as many budgetary subjects can be complex and difficult to parse. However, these institutions find ways to identify clear areas of focus that people can engage with visually, and in a way that is familiar to their own personal circumstances. This often requires some creativity.
3.3.2. Additional considerations in improving how public finances are communicated
The experiences of institutions with strong communications are helpful in exploring how to improve communications about public finances, but other examples can also provide valuable insights.
This section reflects on the importance of simplicity and readability. It also looks at what can be learned from a recent plain‑language renaissance at the European Central Bank (ECB).
Simplicity
In communicating public finances, it is important to be aware of the knowledge gap between experts and non-experts as well as some of the fundamental challenges of understanding public finances identified in previous sections.
First, it is worth noting that bad communications can cause problems internally as well as externally. It is important to embed good communications throughout an organisation. This can improve internal debate, refine thinking, and dispel unhelpful and opaque language before it makes its way into the public realm.
Second, it is helpful to focus on why certain aspects of public finances matter. This is something often taken for granted and overlooked in budgetary reporting. It should not be assumed that readers necessarily understand why high or rising debt might pose a concern. Low levels of financial literacy are commonplace and it appears that a weak understanding of the basics extends to public finance issues too, even among key stakeholders.
The United States CBO addresses this well in its work. It frequently revisits some of the fundamental risks associated with debt sustainability rather than taking it for granted that people know this intuitively. It also makes a point of directing readers to its well-written primer on federal debt when relevant (CBO, 2020[11]).
Third, cognitive science provides some key insights as to how to further simplify public finances. There is a developing literature on language use that is relevant to how public finances are discussed. Table 3.1 draws together some insights from the cognitive science literature that considers how people understand large quantities, one of the fundamental challenges highlighted earlier on.
Sources: various (see the first column).
Make things readable
One way to improve communication is to focus on readability, or how easy it is to understand a piece of writing.
Readability is about more than just using short words and sentences. While readability formulas can be a helpful starting point, they do not always account for factors such as confusing vocabulary or how well a text is structured. Newer methods assess things such as vocabulary variety, sentence structure, and use of concrete language to give a more complete picture of readability.
Even with these advancements, human judgment is still crucial to consider complex elements such as layout and whether the message is clear (Box 3.1).
Making public finances easier to understand requires communicating them more clearly. One aspect of this is making things more readable. But readability, as it is usually measured, is not sufficient. Developing people’s understanding requires knowing the audience and what people will consider both useful and desirable.
Measuring readability
There are several websites that provide tools to measure readability. These rely on a variety of measures to assess how readable some text is. Examples include readability.io, webfx.com and readabilityformulas.com. These offer an objective way to refine text and make it more readable.
Traditional measures tend to have a narrow focus
Many of the traditional measures employed by readability websites focus on how dense a text is. That is, they consider things such as words per sentence, letters or syllables per word, and so on. Examples of these measures include the automated readability index, the Gunning-Fog index, the SMOG index, the Coleman–Liau index, and the Flesch–Kincaid grade level. They encourage the use of shorter words and sentences to make things more readable.
However, focusing on density alone can be misguided. It ignores the intended meaning of a text, how confusing the words are, how coherent the text is and so on. A passage of text might be short and use small words but still be difficult to follow. This might be because it contains abstract ideas, words with ambiguous meaning, words from many different fields, or awkward sentence structures.
Newer measures go deeper but are less straightforward
Broader readability measures have emerged over time. These look beyond density. Measures such as the New Dale-Chall Readability formula rely on lists of familiar words to help gauge how easy it will be to read a text. Some newer measures go further again to develop a more comprehensive framework. For example, the Common European Framework of Reference for languages includes the usual density variables alongside newer measures. It includes variables such as pronouns per sentence, prepositions per sentence, and the number of names and terms included. All these measures can then be mapped onto an overall measure of how easy it is to understand a text.
Modern natural language processing tools have taken things a step further still. They use far more sophisticated techniques for understanding readability. Examples include CAREC, Coh-Metrix, TAACO, the Educational Testing Service’s TextEvaluator, and the Pearson Reading Maturity Metric. Generally, these tools involve a few steps. First, researchers identify a large number of texts. Second, they model how readers understand text based on relevant features. Third, they develop a summary score of these features, for example using principal components analysis or regression models. Finally, human ratings of text complexity are modelled as a function of the estimated scores. The idea is to predict the human ratings based on the features modelled. Many of these newer methods have outperformed traditional readability formulas.
A limitation is that these newer natural language processing tools tend not to be as straightforward to assess and use. They are also less readily available compared to other methods.1
Nonetheless, it can be instructive to look at the specific features these models focus. Especially those that they find important to successfully predict human ratings of text readability. For instance, they consider how varied the vocabulary is and how cohesive the text is. As in, does it use the same words over and over, or does it use a wide variety of different words from different contexts? Is the text structured well so that it does not overly rely on the reader having prior knowledge of content outside of the text? They look at syntactic complexity: the burden put on people’s short-term memory by how complex the connecting branches in a text are. They consider how frequently ambiguous words with more than one meaning are used. They consider how “concrete” words are – their likelihood of evoking meaningful mental images. In addition, they may consider conversational style and the presence of a narrative. These are complex to assess, but they can be important to consider when trying to enhance readability.
There are still gaps
As tools such as these advance, they have the potential to improve how complex subjects such as the public finances are communicated. But there are still limits. Features such as whether the key messages are upfront, whether headings help make content manageable, how helpful charts, tables, and pictures are, and how inviting the page layout is should also be considered. Artificial intelligence will be able to help people write in ways that satisfy readability measures. Ultimately, however, artificial intelligence cannot do all the work. Instead, style guides can help get the balance right and provide guidance on areas not considered by readability tools. Moreover, there is still some value to interviewing stakeholders to better understand whether they find material useful, convincing, enjoyable, and easy to follow.
1. The Coh-Metrix programme is available as a web tool on registration at: https://soletlab.asu.edu/coh-metrix/. TAACO is available for download at: https://www.linguisticanalysistools.org/taaco.html. A useful summary tool is ARTE, which assesses a range of new and old readability formulas: https://nlp.gsu.edu/.
Lessons from the European Central Bank’s plain-language renaissance
Another example is provided by the European Central Bank (ECB). The ECB has successfully overhauled its communications in recent years, making it more accessible and relatable (see Box 3.2).
The ECB has prioritised revitalising its communications. After a comprehensive review, the ECB published its findings (Assenmacher et al., 2021[19]) and reformed many of its practices. It put an emphasis on plain-speaking, favouring narratives over precision, and layering its communications for different readers.
Building trust
Before its communications overhaul, there was a view that ECB communications were essential policy reading and so did not need to go beyond catering to a pool of experts.
By overhauling its communications, the ECB sought to instil wider trust and confidence in its decisions. It viewed building trust as helping people understand its policy decisions and, in turn, helping its efforts to maintain steady price rises across the Euro Area. This was seen as vital to safeguarding its credibility and the wider trust in the financial system.
How was it done?
A key feature of the overhaul was to make its communications punchier, more relatable, more accessible, and to imbue them with a clearer narrative. It went about this by putting more emphasis on several areas:
Readability: the ECB encouraged staff to produce grade-level measures of readability. These measurements are readily available in standard packages such as Microsoft Word. The measures offered a quick and reasonably insightful way to assess readability across documents and between institutions, while satisfying economists’ thirst for data. The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level measure they rely on is also easy to communicate as it is expressed in terms of the “years of schooling required to understand a given passage of text”.1 Language previously used in the monetary policy accounts describing ECB monetary policy deliberations and decisions entailed an average of 16 to 18 years of education being required to understand them.
Narratives over precision: another decision was to prioritise clear narratives over precise statistical data points. Rather than saying “staff projections indicate that real GDP growth will rise from 1 per cent to 2 per cent”, it favoured a simpler “growth is expected to pick up”. Following this, instead of “unemployment rates are expected to fall to 5 per cent”, a more salient “many more people will have jobs” was preferred when developing the narrative. This was a big shift. It met some initial internal resistance. Understandably, many felt it would threaten the accuracy of the ECB’s statements and risked promoting widespread misunderstandings. However, communications staff at the ECB feel that these risks were overstated and contend that there is no sense that misunderstandings have resulted.
Accessible language: as well as focusing on clearer narratives, the ECB has developed a clear glossary that eschews jargon. Its communications staff developed internal glossaries to identify clearer phrases to replace much of the technical language it frequently used in the past. This covers everything from references to banks (often labelled “non-monetary financial institutions” in the past), descriptions of economic activity, and discussions of risks.
Layering communications: The ECB also introduced efforts to distil its analysis in ways that targets different audiences. This layering of its communications is a useful way to broaden the intended audience. It entails creating more ways to access the same content, be it in-depth papers or executive summaries, blogs, or social media posts.
An example of how this layering is implemented is the “at a glance” Monetary Policy Statements. These are visual statements that explain monetary policy decisions taken every six weeks. In keeping with other aims, they are short, easy-to-understand, and focused on the narrative rather than precise data. As well as that, the statements are highly visual, leaning on graphics and simple charts alongside short bits of text. They are available in 24 EU languages. One aspect of this work that has been emphasised by some central banks is the importance of developing multiple style guides – tools to ensure that formatting, style, and content has a consistent format and voice.
Stressing the benefits of both traditional and new media: Following the review, the ECB stressed how traditional media, such as television, remains important and a relatively untapped means for reaching the wider public.
It might be in decline, but television remains a crucial medium through which people hear their news (Newman et al., 2025[20]). Moreover, it can connect to audiences beyond the usual pool of experts. Connecting more broadly like this helps build trust, accountability, and credibility.
Nevertheless, social media offers unprecedented opportunities for direct communication. As such, the ECB has also increased the number of channels through which it communicates, including through Instagram, X and LinkedIn. The experiences with social media are viewed as a success, though they have tended to involve an ad hoc approach and central bank follower numbers remain modest relative to population sizes. To be more effective, the view is that these will need to evolve to be more targeted and to better understand people’s attitudes, needs, and interests.
Listening: One of the takeaways from the ECB’s strategy review that had a lot of traction was the benefit of its listening activities. During the review, the Eurosystem held numerous events with the academic community, civil society organisations and the public at large, as well as exchanges with national and European parliaments. One view coming out of these interactions was that central banks needed to explain their role better and use understandable language and relatable examples to engage with the public. As a result, the Governing Council plans to make outreach events an ongoing feature of the Eurosystem’s interaction with the public, with events having both a “listening” and an “explaining” dimension, to help the public understand the ECB’s strategy and its implications.
1. See (Microsoft, n.d.[21]) for technical support page.
Sources: Assenmacher et al., (2021[19]); Newman et al., (2025[20]) and ECB presentation at the 2024 Annual Meeting of the OECD Working Party of Parliamentary Budget Officials and Independent Fiscal Institutions, Athens (unpublished).
3.3.3. Key takeaways: Seven steps to improve fiscal communications
Key insights drawn from these best practices offer seven steps to improve how institutions communicate public finance issues (see Figure 3.7).
1. Embed a communications culture
Embedding a strong communications culture throughout an organisation leads to better communications and a greater impact. It is not enough to have one or two communications experts, with peripheral roles. The value of having an embedded approach is shown by institutions such as the Netherlands CPB, the Canadian PBO, and the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council. It can be achieved by focusing on training staff to communicate clearly from day one and throughout their working lives.
2. Open up
Opening up is a key part of communicating successfully. One of the ways that Netherlands CPB and Canadian PBO achieved greater impact was by allowing staff to talk openly with journalists and proactively engaging with the press, even if it means staff stepping outside their comfort zones. This openness is seen as essential to building strong media relationships, trust, and ultimately boosting the organisation's impact.
3. Use accessible language
Accessible language is crucial. The curse of knowledge means a tendency to wrongly assume others understand complex topics experts understand well. Ways to make language more accessible include the following:
Make things more readable, focusing on clear communication, not just short words and sentences
Replace technical jargon with easy-to-understand phrases that are still reasonably precise in their intent
Use perspective clauses: simple sentences with percentages, ratios, rankings or other comparisons that provide context on the large figures being discussed
Emphasise clear narratives rather than precise details and numbers
These tactics can help make communications more accessible to a broader audience.
4. Layer communications
A common feature of those with best practices for communications is that they layer their content. They develop many ways of delivering the same message while being mindful of different audiences. This includes everything from in-depth papers to executive summaries, to shorter explainers, to blogs, social media posts, short videos, infographics and so on. Important to this is the development of multiple style guides – tools to ensure that formatting, style, and content has a consistent format and voice across each of the different layers being developed.
5. Use both social media and traditional media effectively
Reaching a broad audience effectively requires a two-pronged approach. This means leveraging both traditional media and social media. Traditional media such as television maintain a strong reach and connect with a wider public beyond experts. This is vital for building trust and accountability.
Social media, on the other hand, offer a chance for direct communication with the public. Such communication should be targeted and consider audience needs and interests. The institutions with the greatest communications impact have been those that use a combination of both traditional and social media channels, ensuring their message reaches a wide range of audiences.
6. Get creative
A number of organisations have developed creative ways to engage their audience. This can be through innovative data visualisations, catchy graphics, neater explainers, or short videos. Examples include the Netherlands’ CPB’s “off the charts” debt chart, the Irish Fiscal Council’s social contributions impact charts, and the Canadian PBO’s Navy commitments chart. A unifying theme is that these approaches convey complex ideas in a way that is simple, striking or that connects to its audience in a more tangible way.
7. Track and refine impact
To ensure their message resonates, successful institutions prioritise tracking and refining their communications impact. They monitor media mentions, web traffic, and even, in the case of larger institutions, parliamentary mentions to understand how their message is being received. This data allow them to refine their approach, tailor content, and identify new communications approaches. Ultimately, this helps ensure their efforts are not wasted and they achieve the desired impact.
Communicating clearly about public finances is essential for strengthening public understanding and building support for the difficult fiscal decisions ahead. While many institutions face similar communications challenges – from the inherent difficulty of conveying large numbers to the wider disengagement created by a shifting media landscape – these barriers can be overcome with the right institutional foundations and a renewed emphasis on clarity, openness and accessibility.
Experiences across OECD countries demonstrate that effective fiscal communication is rooted in institutional credibility. Communications efforts have greatest impact when they are supported by robust, independent analysis and when they form part of a wider organisational culture rather than a stand‑alone activity. Institutions that embed communications throughout their work, cultivate constructive relationships with the media and present complex issues through relatable narratives are better able to enter national debates and sustain public trust.
At the same time, it is important to adapt communication to different audiences. Layering content, making language more accessible, simplifying large numbers and making abstract concepts concrete all help bridge the gap between technical analysis and everyday understanding. Cognitive science reinforces this approach: people respond more strongly to clear narratives, well‑chosen anchors and personal relevance than to precise but opaque detail.
Clear communication around public finances requires a concerted effort across the entire fiscal ecosystem. Governments and parliaments can build on the insights from independent fiscal institutions by continuing to refine their communications capabilities and systematically improve how they explain fiscal issues to the public. Building on cognitive science and best practices from central actors, such as IFIs, suggests seven steps that can improve fiscal communication more widely: embed a communications culture, open up to media, use plain language, layer content for different audiences, leverage social media, use visuals creatively and rigorously track impact to refine future communications.
Ultimately, good communication is not an optional extra. It is central to how societies understand their fiscal choices. When supported by independent analysis and a culture that values openness and clarity, strong communication can help strengthen trust, bridge gaps between experts and citizens and ensure that debates about public finances are grounded in robust independent analysis, framed in accessible terms and connected to people’s everyday experiences.
References
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← 1. These are all scored based on the Fiscal Advocacy Index weightings.
← 2. Less than 30% of for experts and gifted senior student responses were considered acceptably accurate. For all other categories of elementary, middle and high school students, less than 5% of responses fell within one order of magnitude of being accurate.