As countries increasingly focus on meeting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), attention is often focused on the financing gap governments face in meeting their commitments. Not enough questions are being asked about governments’ capacity to effectively manage and spend the resources that they already have – or say they have. In this paper, researchers use a recent dataset to look at how “credible” government budgets are across the world – by “credible” we mean the extent to which actual spending matches the approved budget – and, at how spending in specific areas of government intervention is affected.