Download or read book Open Budgets written by Sanjeev Khagram and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explicates political economy factors that have brought about greater transparency and participation in budget settings across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This title presents the strategies, policies, and institutions through which improvements can occur and produce change in policy and institutional outcomes.
Download or read book The Economics of Transparency in Politics written by Gianluigi Galeotti and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The purpose of this book is to formulate economic models of the advantages and costs of transparency in various areas of public sector activity and to assess what level of obfuscation in politics is rational. The chapters are arranged in four parts. Part 1 is concerned with the manifestations of transparency and obfuscation in domestic democratic settings whilst Part 2 deals with the same realities but in an international context. Part 3 looks at corruption and Part 4 considers some of the implications of transparency and obfuscation for the working of governments and the formulation of public policies.
Download or read book The Political Economy of Transparency written by Archon Fung and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper explores the dynamics of transparency. It asks why some government-created systems of disclosure improve over time while others stagnate or degenerate into costly paperwork exercises. Transparency policies inevitably begin as unlikely compromises. Though transparency is universally admired in principle, its particular applications frequently conflict with other societal values or powerful political interests. Disclosing information can clash with efforts to protect proprietary information, guard personal privacy, or limit regulatory burdens. It can also clash with central economic and political objectives of target organizations that may view it as a threat to reputation, markets or political influence. At the same time, the benefits of disclosure are often diffuse. Beneficiaries may be consumers, investors, employees, and community residents. Such users are rarely organized to sustain support and oversight of transparency systems.
Download or read book The Political Economy of Transparency written by Archon Fung and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 45 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Information Democracy and Autocracy written by James R. Hollyer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-27 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Advocates for economic development often call for greater transparency. But what does transparency really mean? What are its consequences? This breakthrough book demonstrates how information impacts major political phenomena, including mass protest, the survival of dictatorships, democratic stability, as well as economic performance. The book introduces a new measure of a specific facet of transparency: the dissemination of economic data. Analysis shows that democracies make economic data more available than do similarly developed autocracies. Transparency attracts investment and makes democracies more resilient to breakdown. But transparency has a dubious consequence under autocracy: political instability. Mass-unrest becomes more likely, and transparency can facilitate democratic transition - but most often a new despotic regime displaces the old. Autocratic leaders may also turn these threats to their advantage, using the risk of mass-unrest that transparency portends to unify the ruling elite. Policy-makers must recognize the trade-offs transparency entails.
Download or read book The Political Economy of Fiscal Transparency and Independent Fiscal Councils written by Mr.Roel M. W. J. Beetsma and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2017-09-01 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The global surge in independent fiscal councils (IFCs) raises three related questions: How can IFCs improve the conduct of fiscal policy? Are they simultaneously desirable for voters and elected policymakers? And are they resilient to changes in political conditions? We build a model in which voters cannot observe the true competence of elected policymakers. IFCs’ role is to mitigate this imperfection. Equilibrium public debt is excessive because policymakers are “partisan” and “opportunistic.” If voters only care about policymakers’ competence, both the incumbent and the voters would be better off with an IFC as the debt bias would shrink. However, when other considerations eclipse competence and give the incumbent a strong electoral advantage or disadvantage, setting up an IFC may be counterproductive as the debt bias would increase. If the incumbent holds a moderate electoral advantage or disadvantage, voters would prefer an IFC, but an incumbent with a large advantage may prefer not to have an IFC. The main policy implications are that (i) establishing an IFC can only lower the debt bias if voters care sufficiently about policymakers’ competence; (ii) not all political environments are conducive to the emergence of IFCs; and (iii) IFCs are consequently vulnerable to shifts in political conditions.
Download or read book Full Disclosure written by Archon Fung and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-03-05 with total page 35 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Governments in recent decades have employed public disclosure strategies to reduce risks, improve public and private goods and services, and reduce injustice. In the United States, these targeted transparency policies include financial securities disclosures, nutritional labels, school report cards, automobile rollover rankings, and sexual offender registries. They constitute a light-handed approach to governance that empowers citizens. However, as Full Disclosure shows these policies are frequently ineffective or counterproductive. Based on a comparative analysis of eighteen major policies, the authors suggest that transparency policies often produce information that is incomplete, incomprehensible, or irrelevant to the consumers, investors, workers, and community residents who could benefit from them. Sometimes transparency fails because those who are threatened by it form political coalitions to limit or distort information. To be successful, transparency policies must place the needs of ordinary citizens at centre stage and produce information that informs their everyday choices.
Download or read book Political Economy of Transparency written by Raphael de Albuquerque Galvao and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation studies public policy in coordination environments, where there is complementarity in the agents' actions. The first chapter studies a model of currency attacks in which the government can choose a credible signal about the fundamentals of the economy. Public signals create partial common knowledge that can lead to multiple equilibria. The optimal policy with commitment is characterized when, if there is multiplicity, the government only cares about its lowest equilibrium payoff. In this case, the public signal is informative and leads to a unique equilibrium, which is preferred to a full disclosure policy. Our results indicate that the government has incentives for being vague in its communication. The highest equilibrium payoff for the government can be achieved with a two-signal policy. In equilibrium, agents follow the public signal and take the same action: either there is a coordinated attack, or all speculators refrain from attacking. The second paper develops a model where short-term reputation concerns guide the public disclosure of information. There are and high and low states that determine the productivity of investment, and the high state is more likely if the government is efficient rather than inefficient. Governments know the state and make public reports with the objective to be perceived as efficient. I find that the inefficient government is never completely truthful in equilibrium. When the efficient government is truthful, the inefficient government sends false reports of a high state with positive probability. This creates uncertainty following the report of a high state: if the true state is high, productivity is underestimated; if the true state is low, productivity is overestimated. This bias reduces welfare in the high state, but there is a tradeoff in the low state: marginal entrepreneurs lose from overestimating productivity; all entrepreneurs gain from a higher aggregate investment. I show that when the trust in the government's report is low, the inefficient government can improve welfare in the low state by sending false reports that increase investment. However, as the trust in the false reports rises, the bias in entrepreneurs' beliefs becomes large and welfare decreases.
Download or read book Making Politics Work for Development written by World Bank and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2016-07-14 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Governments fail to provide the public goods needed for development when its leaders knowingly and deliberately ignore sound technical advice or are unable to follow it, despite the best of intentions, because of political constraints. This report focuses on two forces—citizen engagement and transparency—that hold the key to solving government failures by shaping how political markets function. Citizens are not only queueing at voting booths, but are also taking to the streets and using diverse media to pressure, sanction and select the leaders who wield power within government, including by entering as contenders for leadership. This political engagement can function in highly nuanced ways within the same formal institutional context and across the political spectrum, from autocracies to democracies. Unhealthy political engagement, when leaders are selected and sanctioned on the basis of their provision of private benefits rather than public goods, gives rise to government failures. The solutions to these failures lie in fostering healthy political engagement within any institutional context, and not in circumventing or suppressing it. Transparency, which is citizen access to publicly available information about the actions of those in government, and the consequences of these actions, can play a crucial role by nourishing political engagement.
Download or read book The Political Economy of Government Auditing written by Carlos Santiso and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-05-18 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Political Economy of Government Auditing addresses the elusive quest for greater transparency and accountability in the management of public finances in emerging economies; and, more specifically, it examines the contribution of autonomous audit agencies (AAAs) to the fight against corruption and waste. Whilst the role of audit agencies in curbing corruption is increasingly acknowledged, there exists little comparative work on their institutional effectiveness. Addressing the performance of AAAs in emerging economies, Carlos Santiso pursues a political economy perspective that addresses the context in which audit agencies are embedded, and the governance factors that make them work or fail. Here, the cases of Argentina, Brazil and Chile are examined, as they illustrate the three – parliamentary, court and independent – models of AAAs in modern states, and their three distinct trajectories of reform, or lack of reform. Beyond Latin America, considerations on the reform of government auditing in other countries, developed and developing are also taken up as, it is argued, while institutional arrangements for government auditing matter, political factors ultimately determine the effectiveness of AAAs. Reforming AAAs, it is concluded, must consider the trajectory of state building, the role of law in public administration and the quality of governance. An important contribution to the comparative study of governance institutions, and especially those tasked with overseeing the budget and curbing corruption, The Political Economy of Government Auditing will be of interest to scholars and students of comparative politics, development studies, administrative law, and public finance; as well as to development practitioners and policy-makers in developing countries, donor governments and international institutions.
Download or read book Transparency in Government Operations written by Mr.J. D. Craig and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 1998-02-03 with total page 50 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transparency in government operations is widely regarded as an important precondition for macroeconomic fiscal sustainability, good governance, and overall fiscal rectitude. Notably, the Interim Committee, at its April and September 1996 meetings, stressed the need for greater fiscal transparency. Prompted by these concerns, this paper represents a first attempt to address many of the aspects of transparency in government operations. It provides an overview of major issues in fiscal transparency and examines the IMF's role in promoting transparency in government operations.
Download or read book Government Transparency written by T. Erkkilä and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-09-17 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transparency has become a global concept of responsible government. This book argues that the transnational discourse of transparency promotes potentially contradictory policy ideas that can lead to unintended consequences. It critically examines whether or not increased transparency really leads to increased democratic accountability.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Economic and Institutional Transparency written by Jens Forssbaeck and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-01 with total page 619 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, the term 'transparency' has emerged as one of the most popular and keenly-touted concepts around. In the economic-political debate, the principle of transparency is often advocated as a prerequisite for accountability, legitimacy, policy efficiency, and good governance, as well as a universal remedy against corruption, corporate and political scandals, financial crises, and a host of other problems. But transparency is more than a mere catch-phrase. Increased transparency is a bearing ideal behind regulatory reform in many areas, including financial reporting and banking regulation. Individual governments as well as multilateral bodies have launched broad-based initiatives to enhance transparency in both economic and other policy domains. Parallel to these developments, the concept of transparency has seeped its way into academic research in a wide range of social science disciplines, including the economic sciences. This increased importance of transparency in economics and business studies has called for a reference work that surveys existing research on transparency and explores its meaning and significance in different areas. The Oxford Handbook of Economic and Institutional Transparency is such a reference. Comprised of authoritative yet accessible contributions by leading scholars, this Handbook addresses questions such as: What is transparency? What is the rationale for transparency? What are the determinants and the effects of transparency? And is transparency always beneficial, or can it also be detrimental (if so, when)? The chapters are presented in three sections that correspond to three broad themes. The first section addresses transparency in different areas of economic policy. The second section covers institutional transparency and explores the role of transparency in market integration and regulation. Finally, the third section focuses on corporate transparency. Taken together, this volume offers an up-to-date account of existing work on and approaches to transparency in economic research, discusses open questions, and provides guidance for future research, all from a blend of disciplinary perspectives.
Download or read book China s Governance Puzzle written by Jonathan R. Stromseth and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-09 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The apparent contradiction between China's rapid economic reforms and political authoritarianism is much debated by scholars of comparative political economy. This is the first examination of this issue through the impact of a series of administrative reforms intended to promote government transparency and increase public participation in China.
Download or read book The Right to Know written by Ann Florini and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Right to Know is a timely and compelling consideration of a vital question: What information should governments and other powerful organizations disclose? Excessive secrecy corrodes democracy, facilitates corruption, and undermines good public policymaking, but keeping a lid on military strategies, personal data, and trade secrets is crucial to the protection of the public interest. Over the past several years, transparency has swept the world. India and South Africa have adopted groundbreaking national freedom of information laws. China is on the verge of promulgating new openness regulations that build on the successful experiments of such major municipalities as Shanghai. From Asia to Africa to Europe to Latin America, countries are struggling to overcome entrenched secrecy and establish effective disclosure policies. More than seventy now have or are developing major disclosure policies or laws. But most of the world's nearly 200 nations do not have coherent disclosure laws; implementation of existing rules often proves difficult; and there is no consensus about what disclosure standards should apply to the increasingly powerful private sector. As governments and corporations battle with citizens and one another over the growing demand to submit their secrets to public scrutiny, they need new insights into whether, how, and when greater openness can serve the public interest, and how to bring about beneficial forms of greater disclosure. The Right to Know distills the lessons of many nations' often bitter experience and provides careful analysis of transparency's impact on governance, business regulation, environmental protection, and national security. Its powerful lessons make it a critical companion for policymakers, executives, and activists, as well as students and scholars seeking a better understanding of how to make information policy serve the public interest.
Download or read book China s Governance Puzzle written by Jonathan R. Stromseth and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-27 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China is widely viewed as a global powerhouse that has achieved a remarkable economic transformation with little political change. Less well known is that China's leaders have also implemented far‐reaching governance reforms designed to promote government transparency and increase public participation in official policymaking. What are the motivations behind these reforms and, more importantly, what impact are they having? This puzzle lies at the heart of Chinese politics and could dictate China's political trajectory for years to come. This extensive collaborative study not only documents the origins and scope of these reforms across China, but offers the first systematic assessment by quantitatively and qualitatively analyzing the impact of participation and transparency on important governance outcomes. Comparing across provinces and over time, the authors argue that the reforms are resulting in lower corruption and enhanced legal compliance, but these outcomes also depend on a broader societal ecosystem that includes an active media and robust civil society.
Download or read book The Political Economy of Good Governance written by Sisay Asefa and published by W.E. Upjohn Institute. This book was released on 2015-06-08 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A notable group of social scientists explore the political economy of good governance and how it relates to performance management, the influence of political parties, education and health issues in developing countries, the economic performance of transition economies, and the effects of climate on poverty.
