Fiscal transparency Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI)<br> • Government finance statistics (GFS) Fiscal transparency 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
Fiscal capacity cannot improve fiscal capacity by simply raising taxes if it does not have a political, legal and fiscal history that has supported such state-power. In comparison to Besley and Persson's individual level study, Gordon and Li (2009) focus on the role of businesses and the financial sector in developed versus developing countries. They model businesses' participation in the financial sector—where Gordon and Li specifically refer to participation in the financial sector as using banks—as participation in the formal sector; they assume that tax authorities can monitor bank records, so that mass participation in the financial sector lends the state information