Fiscal illusion Mourao (2008) attempts to quantify fiscal illusion empirically for almost 70 democracies since 1960. Fiscal illusion Fiscal illusion is a public choice theory of government expenditure first developed by the Italian economist Amilcare Puviani in his 1903 book "Teoria della illusione finanziaria" ("Theory of Financial Illusion" (not yet translated into English, but translated into German in 1960 under the title "Die Illusionen in der öffentlichen Finanzwirtschaft", Berlin: Dunker & Humblot, 1960)). Fiscal illusion suggests that when government revenues are not completely transparent or are not fully perceived by taxpayers, then the cost of government is seen to be less than
Fiscal transparency 2012 reviewed the state of fiscal transparency in the wake of the global financial crisis and proposed a series of improvements to existing international fiscal transparency standards and monitoring arrangements. The 2012 paper laid the groundwork for the IMF’s new Fiscal Transparency Code and Fiscal Transparency Evaluation that replaced the 2007 Code and the related fiscal module of the ROSC. The new Code covers four key elements of fiscal transparency: For each of the principles defined in the Code, the new Code differentiates between basic, good, and advanced practices in order to distinguish between different levels of performance and capacity