Esta dissertação visa contribuir com uma agenda específica na Ciência Política, a saber, a questão da transparência de dados econômicos e sociais. Apesar da importância que tem sido dada ao tema, são poucos os estudos que analisam os determinantes políticos da transparência. Quando o fazem, utilizam medidas de democracia e variáveis socioeconômicas em sua explicação. Nosso texto vai além disso e identifica que a variação no nível de transparência pode ser explicada por variáveis institucionais e de competição política, vale dizer, o tipo de forma de governo e força da oposição em países democráticos, em um primeiro momento, e a consolidação democrática na sobre as novas democracias da América Latina em sequência. A nossa análise se debruça sobre uma amostra de 78 países de 1980 a 2007 e evidência efeitos significativos de nossas variáveis explicativas. / This thesis aims to contribute to a specific agenda in political science, namely the issue of transparency of economic and social data. Despite the importance that has been given to this issue, there are few studies that examine the political determinants of transparency. When they do, they are using measures of democracy and socioeconomic variables in their explanation. Our text goes beyond this and identifies that change in the level of transparency can be explained by institutional variables and political competition, that is, the kind of form of government and opposition forces in democratic countries, at first, and the consolidation democratic in on the new democracies in Latin America in sequence. Our analysis focuses on a sample of 78 countries from 1980 to 2007 and evidence significant effects of our explanatory variables.

Submitted by Joel de Lima Pereira Castro Junior (joelpcastro@uol.com.br) on 2016-07-23T21:31:21Z No. of bitstreams: 1 VeríssimoSantos.pdf: 1335864 bytes, checksum: 3909b6f6a708baeb3cba0132516f4f67 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Biblioteca de Administração e Ciências Contábeis (bac@ndc.uff.br) on 2016-07-27T16:19:25Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 VeríssimoSantos.pdf: 1335864 bytes, checksum: 3909b6f6a708baeb3cba0132516f4f67 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-07-27T16:19:25Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 VeríssimoSantos.pdf: 1335864 bytes, checksum: 3909b6f6a708baeb3cba0132516f4f67 (MD5) / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior. / O fenômeno da corrupção abala os valores republicanos, gerando o descrédito da sociedade com relação à democracia. Por isso, é necessário fortalecer os instrumentos de controle da administração pública, principalmente aqueles que são franqueados à sociedade exercer na fiscalização do uso dos recursos públicos. Com o avanço das tecnologias de informação e comunicação, a transparência se destaca como uma importante ferramenta de ampliação do controle social, favorecendo o acesso à informação, a interatividade com os poderes públicos e o governo aberto. No Brasil, a Lei Complementar n° 131/09 veio favorecer o aumento da transparência na gestão pública, alcançando todas as esferas de poder, com a obrigatoriedade de divulgação da execução financeira e orçamentária dos entes federativos em tempo real na Internet. Neste estudo, apresenta-se um histórico das recentes iniciativas legislativas e governamentais de promoção da transparência pública através da Internet no Brasil. Tendo como referencial a Teoria da Agência, que está na base de desenhos institucionais favoráveis à accountability, este trabalho pretende verificar o nível de transparência dos portais eletrônicos oficiais dos municípios do Estado do Rio de Janeiro com mais de cem mil habitantes. O objetivo é avaliar se tais entes federativos estão cumprindo as exigências legais, vale dizer, os requisitos determinados pela chamada Lei de Transparência. O conteúdo, a série histórica e frequência de atualização e a usabilidade desses portais foram os parâmetros utilizados para a análise dos sites. A partir da obtenção do Índice de Transparência dos municípios, foi possível estabelecer um ranking dos municípios fluminenses mais transparentes. / The corruption phenomenon affects republican values, generating the discredit of society concerned to democracy. Therefore, it is necessary to strengthen the control instruments of public administration, mainly those ones used in the supervision of public resources. Due to the improvement of information technology and communication, transparency stands out as an important tool for expanding social control, facilitating access to information and the open interaction with government. In Brazil, Complementary Law No. 131/09 increased transparency in public administration, reaching all power spheres by requiring mandatory real-time disclosure of financial and budget execution of federative entities on the Internet. This study presents some historic of recent legislative and governmental initiatives to promote public transparency through the Internet in Brazil. Taking as reference the Agency Theory, which is the basis of institutional designs favorable to accountability, this work intends to verify the level of transparency of official municipalities homepages of the state of Rio de Janeiro with more than one hundred thousand inhabitants. The aim of the work is to assess whether such federal entities are complying with legal requirements, that is, the requirements determined by the so-called Law of Transparency. The content, the history, update frequency and usability of these portals were the parameters used for the analysis of the sites. Through the Transparency Index of the municipalities, it was possible to establish a ranking to determine what are the more transparent municipalities in the state of Rio de Janeiro.

On the Internet today, users are accustomed to disclosing personal information when accessing a new service. When a user does so, there is rarely a system in place which allows the user to monitor how his or her information is actually shared or used by services. One proposed solution to this problem is to have services perform transparency logging on behalf of users, informing them how their data is processed as processing is taking place. We have recently participated in a collaboration to develop a privacy-preserving secure logging scheme that can be used for the purpose of transparency logging. As part of that collaboration we created a proof of concept implementation. In this thesis, we elaborate on that implementation and integrate it with a minimalistic open source issue-tracking system. We evaluate the amount of work required to integrate the logging system and attempt to identify potential integration problems. Using this issue-tracking system we then design and implement a scenario that demonstrates the value of the logging system to the average user.

Master of Science / School of Family Studies and Human Services / Melinda S. Markham / Interpersonal aspects of a relationship (i.e., equality, trust, disclosure, etc.) as they relate to finances have important implications for marital satisfaction; however, emphasis on financial transparency, “the open and honest disclosure of one’s finances,” has yet to be researched. To increase our capacity to study the role of finances in the marital relationship, the purpose of this study was to develop the Financial Transparency Scale (FTS) to assess financial transparency between married partners. A sample of 183 married individuals in their first 5 years of their first marriage completed an online survey, consisting of the FTS and four related scales. Principal components analysis (PCA) was conducted to determine the FTS is comprised of three components: financial partnership, financial secrecy, and financial trust and disclosure of the individual partner. The first component, financial partnership (eigenvalue = 10.909), consisted of 18 items and accounted for 41.96% of the variance and had a high internal reliability of (α = .95). Component 2, financial secrecy (eigenvalue = 2.845), consisted of three items and accounted for 10.94% of variance with an internal reliability of (α = .93). Component 3, financial trust and disclosure of the individual partner (eigenvalue = 1.76), consisted of five items and accounted for 6.77% of total variance with an internal reliability (α = .83). The FTS was positively correlated with four related scales: the Kansas Marital Satisfaction Scale, the Shared Goals and Values Scale, the Frequency of Financial Management Scale, and the Communication Patterns Questionnaire – Short Form, each of which are key behaviors of financial and marital satisfaction. The FTS will benefit financial practitioners as they can use the scale to determine the level of financial transparency between married individuals, drawing attention to areas of concern such as financial secrecy between partners. For researchers, this scale provides a measurement for a sophisticated perspective on the interpersonal factors that mediate financial transparency between married individuals.

The diploma thesis is focused on the problems of corruption in the Czech Republic, from the viewpoint of non-state non-profit organizations. The thesis provides a general overview of engaging organizations in the struggle against corruption, basic information on their position in the civil society, role in anticorruption activities and mainly their individual dissimilarities. The key part of this thesis analyses concrete corruption causes, monitors their impact on the society and at the same time it evaluates involvement and contribution of the organization to the result of the given cause. The final evaluation monitors efficiency of this activity from the viewpoint of reparation of the original status or in case of corruption revelation, it monitors determination and penalization of responsible people. It looks for reasons of unsuccessful interventions of non-profit organizations, compares individual procedures and specifics and interconnections of other activities of anticorruption organizations. It tries to suggest a possible way of efficiency measurement by the comparison of revenues and expenses on the given cause and evaluates the position of non-profit organizations in the struggle against corruption as compared to its own transparency.

This dissertation attempts to analyze the impact of transparency and credibility of central banks on financial markets. While the topic of central bank's transparency has been extensively elaborated in literature, the linkage between institutional framework and empirical characteristics of transparency and credibility have not been adequately described. The study aims to overcome this absence and try to quantify transparency and credibility of central banks, as well as to analyze the relationship between them and their effect on interest rates and inflation expectations. The analysis is performed for nine major central banks: the Reserve Bank of Australia, the Bank of Canada, the European Central Bank (ECB), the Bank of Japan, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the Sveriges Riksbank, the Swiss National Bank, the Bank of England, and the U.S. Federal Reserve, and three central and eastern European central banks--the National Bank of Poland, the Hungarian National Bank and the Czech National Bank (CNB). The transparency index, based on survey, is constructed for all twelve central banks mentioned above, while measures of transparency and credibility that are derived from financial market instruments are performed only for the ECB, Fed and the CNB. Finally, we analyze the impact of transparency and credibility of the CNB on interest rates and inflation expectations. The analysis shows that central bank transparency has improved substantially in the last decade. The most transparent central banks in our sample are the Sveriges Riksbank and the Czech National Bank, followed by the Bank of England. A range of communication channels that improve the transparency of monetary policy, however, have little impact on central bank credibility. It is primarily policy-makers' verbal comments, monetary policy implementation and clarity that affect the predictability of monetary policy and contribute most to increasing its credibility. Therefore, the main reason of low credibility is confusing communication, which cannot be eliminated even by maximum openness of the central bank. The additional study of the Czech National Bank showed that during the European debt crisis, greater credibility of the CNB reduced the uncertainty in financial market and contributed to efficient formation of private agents' inflation expectations. Moreover, the results of the analysis show that inflation expectations in the Czech Republic are formed rationally, i.e. they are based on the CNB inflation forecast rather than on the actual values of inflation.

Since time immemorial extractive industries have been shrouded in secrecy worldwide. This stemmed countries with high levels of corruption and weak administrative systems and vulnerable regulatory frameworks to seldom develop or economically grow from extractive industries revenues. This has led to the identification of transparency as being the evasive factor worldwide to help attract more investments, avoid the resource curse and curb corruption. Malawi is no exception to this trend and has one of the lowly performing and very obscure mining sectors. That though Transparency is a fundamental principle of the Constitution of Malawi; it is not reflected in the Mining laws of Malawi which were enacted before the Constitution. The secrecy that hovers over the activities of the mining sector has provoked various stakeholders to demand their inclusion in the processes of concluding contracts due to lack of visible benefits from existing investments. To avoid difficult forums of stakeholders gathering to make a decision on intended investments to be made, there has been a call to make the mining industry more transparent. This entails the introduction of public scrutiny post-contract making which remains the discretion of the Minister. Attempts to introduce transparency have led to the introduction of Transparency initiatives whose main objective is to ensure transparency is evident in extractive industries such as mining. Malawi is currently deciding whether to adopt one such initiative called the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative. It is a strong advocate for transparency in extractive sector which is voluntary in nature and mandates the disclosure of revenues collected by government and the companies to report the amounts paid to government. Adoption of EITI is pegged to immensely improve the mining sector through increased FDI inflow. This dissertation argued for Malawi to adopt EITI because it found that the Malawian mining sector is governed by ancient laws which are silent on transparency principles. This thesis found that EITI though is a stepping stone for Malawi, it lacks several crucial factors in its scope and the thesis highlights several shortfalls of the initiative. EITI implores revenue transparency over other forms of transparency. And this research found that Malawi needs contract transparency more than revenue transparency because Malawi’s mining sector is contract-based rather than legislative-based thereby recommending Malawi include contract transparency to the standard EITI scope. It was further concluded that Malawi emulates Liberia by extending their scope to include other extractive sectors like agriculture besides the classified Oil, Gas and Mining. This thesis spurred a debate as to enforcement and compliance of EITI. It was discovered that Malawi is already a member to various international instruments that advocate the transparent means of administering the extractive sector but sadly these are not fully implemented in the mining sector. This is attributable to the fact that Malawi’s laws stipulate that newly adopted international laws or standards do not have binding force until converted into domestic legislation. Consequently, since EITI is termed ‘soft law’ because it lacks enforcement, this study concluded that Malawi needs to enact a domestic law to ensure enforcement. This was drawn from the comparable analysis of Nigeria and Liberia who have enacted EITI legislation to ensure effective implementation. It was drawn from this analysis the need to enact legislation codifying EITI in order to ensure compliance and as a form of enforcement. With the idea of introducing a new EITI law, this thesis found that EITI if adopted will be aligned to Malawi’s international obligations but its principles contrary to domestic laws. This study, nevertheless, concluded these inconsistencies can be ironed by explicitly stating in the EITI code that it is an exception to the general laws such as tax laws which prohibit disclosure of taxes paid to third parties. Based on these findings, this dissertation recommends the improvement of transparency in the mining sector through the adoption of EITI. That Malawi should codify it into domestic legislation to convert its voluntary element into mandatory. That this new law should expressly state EITI as an exception to existing laws which it is inconsistent with. It further recommends Malawi includes agriculture to the standard EITI scope as the administration of which could also help boost the economy of which it heavily contributes to. It also recommends the amendment of the mining laws to reflect transparency principles stipulated in the superior law of the land the constitution, international instruments and core principle of EITI. It points out the importance of government to involve existing extractive companies as the adoption of EITI directly impacts them and therefore consultation is vital. / Dissertation (LLM)--University of Pretoria, 2014. / gm2015 / Centre for Human Rights / LLM / Unrestricted

Cette thèse propose d'analyser via l'utilisation de données microéconomiques les canaux spécifiques à travers lesquels la transparence serait susceptible de promouvoir la croissance des firmes appréhendée par l'effort d'Investissement et d'alléger leurs contraintes de financement. Ce travail se donne un double objectif. Il s'agit d'abord, de construire deux scores de transparence microéconomique et macroéconomique à travers une analyse discriminante multiple portant sur un échantillon de 64 pays entre 1997 et 2009, mettant également en évidence les facteurs les plus influents sur les deux types de transparence. Ensuite, l'intégration des scores de transparence dans un modèle d'investissement basé sur l'équation d'Euler permet d'évaluer les effets respectifs des deux types de transparence sur les contraintes de financement et sur le niveau de l'investissement réel. Cette étude, portant sur un échantillon de 5652 firmes entre 2005 et 2009, fait ressortir une hiérarchisation des effets des deux types de transparence. Ces effets sont aussi plus importants pour les firmes des pays émergents. Notre étude suggère également que la transparence microéconomique et la transparence macroéconomique allègent plus les contraintes financières des firmes les moins endettées et stimulent plus l'investissement des firmes les plus endettées. Il ressort de cette recherche que les petites firmes sont plus à même de tirer profit des avantages des deux types de transparence. L'étude met en relief une non-linéarité de l'effet de la transparence microéconomique sur l'investissement et des effets de la transparence macroéconomique sur les contraintes de financement et l'investissement des firmes. / This thesis analyses the specific channels through which transparency promotes the growth of companies apprehended by investment efforts and reduces financing constrains. This work has two objectives. The first objective is to build two transparency measures, microeconomic and macroeconomic, through a multiple discriminant analysis performed on a sample of 64 countries between 1997 and 2009. This analysis put the emphasis on the factors that influences the most either the microeconomic or the macroeconomic transparency levels. Second, the Integration of the transparency measures in an Euler equation allowed to assess the effects of microeconomic and macroeconomic transparency on the financing constrains and the real investment level. This second study was based on data collected on 5652 companies between 2005 and 2009. The output is a prioritization of both kinds of transparency effects. We found that these effects are more important for emerging countries. This study also concludes that microeconomic and macroeconomic transparencies reduce financing constrains further for the firms with lower indebtedness. Transparencies stimulate investment further for the firms with higher indebtedness. This study finally highlights the non-linearity of microeconomic transparency effects on investment and also the non-linearity of macroeconomic transparency effect on financing constrains and on investment.

Certificate Transparency (CT) logs are append-only tamper-evident data structures that can be verified by anyone. For example, it is possible to challenge a log to prove certificate inclusion (membership) and log consistency (append-only, no tampering) based on partial information. While these properties can convince an entity that a certificate is logged and not suddenly removed in the future, there is no guarantee that anyone else observes the same consistent view. To solve this issue a few gossip protocols have been proposed, each with different quirks, benefits, assumptions, and goals. We explore CT gossip below the application layer, finding that packet processors such as switches, routers, and middleboxes can aggregate gossip passively or actively to achieve herd immunity: (in)direct protection against undetectable log misbehaviour. Throughout the thesis we describe, instantiate, and discuss passive aggregation of gossip messages for a restricted data plane programming language: P4. The concept of active aggregation is also introduced. We conclude that (i) aggregation is independent of higher-level transparency applications and infrastructures, (ii) it appears most prominent to aggregate Signed Tree Heads (STHs) in terms of privacy and scalability, and (iii) passive aggregation can be a long-term solution if the CT ecosystem adapts. In other words, not all sources of gossip must be encrypted to preserve privacy. / HITS, 4707

Magister Administrationis - MAdmin / The research investigates the reason why service delivery is slow and not enough or just not available in many areas. It highlights the problems that hamper progress toward achieving service delivery. Some of the problems discussed are: (a) The non-availability of enabling legislation to enable the state department to carry out their projects and plans, including the difficulty of implementing policy. While the government is quick to announce that it is going to achieve certain goals, it does not follow through to achieve these goals. (b) Some of the government ministers are unwilling to bring about a speedy recovery because- (1) they are busy building their own images and wealth; and (2) most of all are party loyalists whose hands are tied by the socialist ideology. While the ministers preach about how successful they are in providing basic services to the people, the very same people we are told are served, are complaining that the government is not doing enough to address the problems that affect the poor. In more cases than one, the situation of the people has remained the same as if they were living during the old apartheid days.