The biggest project in the country is not in the fiscal risk statement.
The IMF’s transparency evaluation, published on 28 August, records that the New Kigali International Airport — a build-own-operate PPP, 60% Qatar Investment Authority, 40% Government — has risen in cost from US$1.5bn to US$2.6bn, 17.3% of GDP, and is “not included in the FRS”. With it, the signed PPP portfolio more than doubles, to 32% of GDP. Sixty contracts; none on the balance sheet.
That last clause is the point. The framework exists and is getting better; the Fund says so. The perimeter still leaves out the single largest exposure. A week earlier, Serbia’s evaluation reached the same rating on PPPs.
Parliament moved two mega projects outside the fiscal rule.
From the 2026 Article IV: “A law proposing the exclusion of the execution of two mega projects of the budget and fiscal rules perimeter was approved by Parliament. This exclusion was not in line with staff recommendations.” The projects — an oil refinery and the Erdeneburen hydropower plant — account for 1.8% of GDP of expected spending this year.
This is the mechanism in its purest form. When a rule binds, the cheapest adjustment is not the deficit; it is the perimeter. And here it did not even buy compliance. Credit where due: the Ministry attached a Fiscal Risks Statement to the budget for the first time.
The PPP claims stock rose €1.1bn in a year — and Parliament published it.
Portugal was forced to put its off-book concessions on the balance sheet during the 2011 bailout. Fifteen years on, Parliament’s budget unit publishes the claims stock every year. This year’s report: contingent liabilities from PPPs of €2,869m at end-2025, up €1,107m; roads €2,360m; the Brisa concession’s claims quantified at a maximum of €1,122.5m, “which does not yet have recognition of responsibility by the State”.
This is the case on this page that is going right: a stock, by sector, with the State’s position on each claim, in public, annually. And note where it lives — in a technical report, not in the deficit or the debt.
Fewer than one low-income country in ten publishes what it owes under its PPPs.
The World Bank’s debt-transparency review: PPPs are used by over two thirds of low-income developing countries, yet “less than 10 percent” quantify the government’s direct and contingent exposure in any debt or fiscal-risk document. Average exposure where estimated: 2% of GDP; above 5% in one country in seven.
Read the two numbers together. Where the recognition test is tight and the table is published every January, the stock that escapes it is small. Where nothing is published, nobody knows what the rule is missing — which is what makes the silence useful.
A rule is only as wide as the number it binds on.
Outside the statement in Rwanda, outside the perimeter in Mongolia, outside the deficit in Portugal, unpublished in nine low-income countries out of ten. Whatever the number does not include is not constrained — and there is always a contract form that fits outside it:
Four documents in a fortnight. Only one of them published the whole stock.