Citizens, Legislators, and Executive Disclosure: The Political Determinants of Fiscal Transparency

Joachim Wehner and Paolo de Renzio

World Development, 2013, vol. 41, issue C, 96-108

Abstract: Increased fiscal transparency is associated with improved budgetary outcomes, lower sovereign borrowing costs, decreased corruption, and less creative accounting by governments. Despite these benefits, hardly any effort has been invested in exploring the determinants of fiscal transparency. Using a new 85-country dataset, we focus on two important sources of domestic demand for open budgeting: citizens and legislators. Our results suggest that free and fair elections have a significant direct effect on budgetary disclosure, and that they dampen the adverse effect on fiscal transparency of dependence on natural resource revenues. We also find that partisan competition in democratically-elected legislatures is associated with higher levels of budgetary disclosure.

Keywords: fiscal transparency; Open Budget Index; governance; accountability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (34)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X12001647
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:41:y:2013:i:c:p:96-108

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2012.06.005

Access Statistics for this article

World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes

More articles in World Development from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().