Transparency, quality of institutions and performance in the Italian Municipalities

Emma Galli, Ilde Rizzo and Carla Scaglioni

No 2017/11, Working Papers Department of Economics from ISEG - Lisbon School of Economics and Management, Department of Economics, Universidade de Lisboa

Abstract: In this paper, we aim at evaluating from an economic perspective the recent Italian legislation on transparency to investigate whether the potentialities of transparency as a tool to improve performance and integrity are fully exploited. We first construct a synthetic indicator (CTI) consisting of two sub-indicators, CTI Integrity and CTI Performance, which are able to describe in numerical terms the overall degree of transparency of Italian public administrations as well as the two different aspects of the public activity’s transparency. Then, using as a sample of Italian municipalities, we address the question whether there is a relation between the fulfillment of transparency obligations and both the institutional quality and the performance of the public administration activity. Our preliminary results suggest that our transparency indicators show a satisfactory correlation with widely used measures of the quality of institutions as well as with the official data on municipalities public spending performance. Key Words: Transparency, quality of institutions, local governments, accountability, performance.

JEL-codes: H3 H7 K2 K4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff, nep-eur, nep-law and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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