Abstract

This thesis has addressed the issue of fiscal transparency for developing countries in three essays. The first essay provided an overview of the existing literature on fiscal transparency and related questions, focusing on different angles and measurement methodologies involved. Our review was structured around four principal axes that include the determinants of fiscal transparency; the links between fiscal transparency and some selected institutional factors relating to international capital markets, and fiscal discipline, corruption, and economic growth. One of the major shortcomings discovered in the literature is the lack of exclusive attention devoted to developing countries on this important issue of fiscal transparency and how this could affect their growth potential.
The second essay proposed a new, replicable and more objective index of fiscal transparency based on criteria of developing countries as used by the World Bank in 2009. We also provided an analysis of the determinants of fiscal transparency based on information from 27 developing countries, taking into account a number of institutional and socio-economic determinants of fiscal transparency. For example, we examined the impacts of natural resources (wealth), quality of institution, openness on the above-mentioned index of fiscal transparency by the means of OLS and Two-Stage Least Square methods. Our empirical findings indicated that the performance of our proposed index appeared to be consistent with other existing indices.
The third essay presented an analysis of some potential consequences of fiscal transparency for developing countries. More specifically, based on the availability of data across the 27 countries of the sample, it was found that fiscal transparency can have some impact on the structure of government spending, education and health outcomes, attraction of international capital, but not economic growth.