March, 2015 | By Paolo de Renzio (GIFT) and the International Budget Partnership
In order to promote deeper understanding around the incentives agenda for fiscal openness across the world, GIFT (Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency) is undertaking additional research, structured around three components:
- A set of think-pieces written by senior academics and practitioners, based on their own past research and policy experience, aimed at gathering the reflections and insights of individuals who have studied, thought about and worked with fiscal openness reforms;
- Reflections on lessons learned by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund on their experience in promoting fiscal openness reforms across a large number of countries over almost two decades; and
- A set of interviews with politicians and senior officials considered “reform champions” in their respective countries, to gather first-hand personal testimonies from people at the forefront of successful fiscal openness reforms.
This paper summarizes the main issues and findings from the think pieces component. These pieces were written by academics and practitioners with broad experience in the fields of public financial management, public accounting, access to information, and government accountability and address a wide range of topics and approaches related to government openness, highlighting different ways to understand the incentives that governments face when it comes to introducing and sustaining open government reforms.
