Fiscal federalism concept" that helps in designing financial relations between the national and subnational levels of the government, "fiscal decentralization on the other hand is a process of applying such principles". Federal and non-federal countries differ in the manner in which such principles are applied. Application differs because unitary and federal governments differ in their political and legislative context and thus provide different opportunities for fiscal decentralization. The concepts of fiscal federalism are related to vertical and horizontal fiscal relations. The notions related to horizontal fiscal relations are related to regional imbalances and horizontal competition. Similarly the notions related to fiscal relations
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