The Impacts of Fiscal Openness: A Review of the Evidence

Fiscal transparency and participation in budgeting are widely promoted and enshrined in an increasing number of international standards and norms. We provide the first structured review of the impacts of “fiscal openness” interventions, based on 38 empirical studies published between 1991 and 2015. Fiscal openness variables are associated with different aspects of the quality of the budget, including macro-fiscal outcomes, resource allocation, and service delivery, as well as wider governance and development outcomes. While only a handful of studies can make a convincing claim to identify causal effects, the most rigorous tests tend to find that fiscal transparency and participation in budgeting have desirable impacts, including reduced corruption, enhanced electoral accountability, and improved allocation of resources. Yet, gaps in the literature leave it to future research to clarify which specific interventions produce impacts, the relative effectiveness of different interventions and their relationships, the multiple impacts they generate, and the conditions under which these impacts materialize. Acknowledgments: We thank Hugh Batrouney for outstanding research assistance, and Alta Folscher, Jonathan Fox, Juan Pablo Guerrero, Tim Irwin, Sanjeev Khagram, Steve Kosack, Victoria Louise Lemieux, Greg Michener, Murray Petrie, Nicola Smithers, and Martin J. Williams for helpful comments and suggestions. This work was supported by the Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency (GIFT).