The OPERA Framework • using Public Expenditure Tracking Surveys (PETS) to ensure accountability for actual expenditures. Other approaches have sought to ‘cost’ the level of spending a government should allocate to advance the necessary policies, plans and programs to realize human rights.63 Costing initiatives have also sought to quantify, in financial terms, the immediate impact of specific ESC rights violations, as well as the more long-term consequences of failing to take action to address them.64 In relation to budget processes, analyzing budget cycles65 can show whether budgets (from formulation to implementation) are ‘accessible, transparent and effective’ and ensure the rights to participation, transparency and information.66 In relation to government revenue, analyzing tax policy, development assistance, debt and deficit financing, monetary policy and financial regulation can give an indication of how well the government has mobilized resources. The Center for Women’s Global Leadership identifies these areas as key points on the ‘Maximum Available Resources (MAR) Star’, a useful heuristic device that speaks to the Committee’s insistence that available resources include potential as well as current resources. More broadly, there has been an important new strand of work at the macro-economic level that goes beyond budget analysis to scrutinize broader areas of economic policy-making from a human rights perspective.67 This challenges the approach to maximum available resources ‘which takes the broad policy parameters that determine the resources available to support economic and social rights as a given’,68 and highlights that external pressures placed on governments, by international organizations, for example, must also be considered when measuring human rights compliance. This is particularly relevant in the context of the global financial crisis.69 Human Rights Impact Assessments Human rights impact assessments (HRIAs) are another tool being increasingly used to evaluate programs, projects, legislation and other activities from the perspective of their compatibility with human rights standards and principles. Conducted either ex-ante or ex-post, HRIAs aim to identify, assess, prevent and/or respond to the potential or actual human rights impacts of a particular intervention. Two areas that have seen increasing use of HRIAs are in monitoring business activity70 and assessing bilateral and multilateral trade and investment agreements.71 Various approaches, adopting a wide range of methodologies to show the cause-effect relationship between the activity being assessed and the enjoyment of human rights, have been proposed or piloted. Draft guiding principles for HRIAs, proposed by the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier de Schutter, in the context of assessing trade and investment agreements, mark a significant development in this area. From a methodological point of view, the guiding principles are important in promoting greater consistency in the area. Specifically, they affirm that HRIAs should make explicit reference to the normative content of human rights obligations and should rely on: 10 • Structural indicators that measure whether an agreement will make it more difficult for the state to ratify particular human rights instruments, to adapt its regulatory framework to the requirements of human rights, or to set up the institutional mechanisms; • Process indicators that measure whether the agreement creates obstacles to the implementation of the state’s policy measures and programs, or to the functioning of institutional mechanisms, that ensure effective fulfillment of the state’s human rights obligations, particularly insofar as such obligations require budgetary commitments; and