Abstract
Financial transparency has been playing the role of one of the most significant approaches to financial reform since the eighties. This is true of not only advanced countries but also developing countries where democratic awareness is blooming among the public, especially countries in poverty, because people there tend to demand more and more aggressively that the government publish important financial information such as the revenue and annual expenses as they get to realize how much the governmental budget impacts on the economical development and the distribution of resources of the country, and Taiwan is among the rest. As democratic trends cracked Taiwanese autocracy in the late eighties, the government began to take a relatively open stance towards publicizing the budgeting processes and the information concerned. Unfortunately, such changes seem to be limited to the central government only. As for the local governments, however, budgeting still tends to be done in black boxes as always.
Indeed, little has been done to enhance the financial transparency of the local governments. People still focus on the facts of local financial difficulties and deficits as well as their demands on the systemization and transparency of central grants-in-aid to the local governments, neglecting the persistent lack of proper financial information publication.
What exactly is the cause of local governmental financial unbalance? Does it come from improper expenditure increase or shortage of income or both? Neither the central government nor the local ones have provided solid and complete background information for the public to make their own judgments from. In fact, the central government should actively help the local governments construct handy, thorough financial information databases and thereby optimize the transparency of critical data, minimizing people¡¦s cost for accessing information and maximizing their interest in participating in local public financial affairs. On December 6, 2005, Taiwanese Legislative Yuan passed the Law of Governmental Information Publication to ensure people¡¦s right to knowledge, promoting their understanding of, trust in, and supervision upon public affairs, taking a big step towards administrative and financial transparency.
The purposes of this research are:
1. By looking back on the literature concerned, the author wishes to make a comparison between the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in terms of how they define the financial transparency of a member country and thereby to get the industrial circle, the government, the academia, and the general public to better understand and to value the concept of financial transparency.
2. Through depth interviews, the author wishes to institutionally, legally, and administratively explore possible strategies and steps that local governments can take to enhance the financial transparency, so that the general public can be better encouraged to participate in and to supervise local financial administration, raising the efficiency in making good use of resources of all kinds, strengthening local finances.
The author suggests that the following steps be taken to enhance local governmental financial transparency:
1. Put together general, concise financial information reports.
2. Open new channels for the publicizing of financial information.
3. Formulate laws and codes concerning governmental financial information release.
4. The central government should build up a platform on which all financial information countrywide can be shown and processed.
5. Set up a national treasury payment information system.
Keywords: Financial transparency, Local government, Tax expenditure
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0824106-083859 |
| Date | 24 August 2006 |
| Creators | Lee, Shen-Man |
| Contributors | Jih-Hwa Wu, Bor-Wen Jenq, NONE, NONE |
| Publisher | NSYSU |
| Source Sets | NSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Language | Cholon |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0824106-083859 |
| Rights | off_campus_withheld, Copyright information available at source archive |
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