Fiscal transparency

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Fiscal transparency refers to the publication of information on how governments raise, spend, and manage public resources. More specifically, it means publication of high quality information on how governments raise taxes, borrow, spend, invest, and manage public assets and liabilities.

Fiscal transparency includes public reporting on the past, present, and future state of public finances. Fiscal policies have critical impacts on economic, social and environmental outcomes in all countries at all levels of development.

Fiscal transparency is sometimes used synonymously with budget transparency. However, fiscal transparency is in principle wider than budget transparency. It includes all public assets, liabilities, and contingent obligations, as well as revenues and expenditures authorised in an annual budget i.e. it includes all stocks as well as flows, whereas stocks often do not feature in budget documents (aside from debt).

Fiscal transparency includes fiscal activities undertaken outside the budget sector but within the government sector e.g. by autonomous government agencies or extra-budgetary funds that may not be reported as part of the budget sector.

Fiscal transparency also includes ‘quasi-fiscal activities’ undertaken outside the government sector by public corporations, the central bank, or (sometimes) by private corporations i.e. activities that are fiscal in character but that are not financed by government but by the corporations themselves, such as subsidised lending or subsidised service delivery by public corporations, or construction of public infrastructure by companies developing natural resources (Reference: Background Paper prepared for the Open Government Partnership-GIFT Fiscal Openness Working Group).