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There is a dearth of research that investigates the impact of national culture on budgeting and management indexes in the public sector across developing countries. Limited studies in accounting and management have explained the role of national culture in shaping organisational and individual values. It is posited that national cultural variables impact budget transparency and performance management. This study contributes to the literature by examining these relations in 16 developing countries.

Adopting an unbalanced timing framework, the current paper seeks to fulfill this gap and applies four cultural dimensions from the GLOBE study (House et al., 2004) as explanatory variables to investigate whether national culture is associated with budget transparency and performance management or not, particularly in the context of developing countries. The paper uses budget transparency as the first dependent variable, based on the OECD database from Qi and Mensah (2011), along with performance management as the second dependent variable, from the BTI Project (2016), according to the leadership's political performance management.

Generally, the empirical findings reveal a minimal relation among GLOBE cultural variables with budget transparency and performance management. Particularly, the empirical findings indicate that only performance orientation has a significant relation with budget transparency and performance management.

The findings of this paper suggest that any plan to improve a nation's budget transparency should consider the links between budgeting, performance management and the culture of those that run them.

The formal adoption of new methods by performance management may not be enough without accompanying efforts to transform performance orientation as an index of national culture.

The analysis intends to clarify whether higher education institutions place as much value on internal transparency as on external transparency. This study aims to analyze the university budgeting process as a reflection of internal transparency. It also aims to identify the weaknesses of the budgeting process regarding transparency in order to improve decision-making.

A case study that applies mixed methods – documentary analysis, observations and interviews – has been conducted. To study internal transparency, the model of three levels of transparency of Biondi and Lapsley (2014) has been applied to the budgeting process of a university. Then, the results have been compared to the external transparency of this institution.

While external transparency is achieved, internal transparency in the budgeting process is far from optimal in the case of study. An improvement in transparency of the budget process can promote the engagement of stakeholders in the process and achieve better governance.

The general inductive approach is not as strong as other approaches in the area of theory or model development. However, it does provide a simple approach for deriving findings linked to this research’s questions.

Trust issues and external accountability appear to be more relevant than internal transparency for universities. However, improving the three levels of transparency along the budgeting process could motivate collegiate members to reinforce accountability, as it requires them to effectively communicate their actions and decisions to their represented.

This paper seeks to situate transparency as an attribute of university governance, contributing to the scarce literature on transparency, internal and external, in the university. The study compares the approach of this university to external transparency – which relates to accountability – with internal transparency – a concept that links to corporate governance. This study uses the novel lens of Biondi and Lapsley model (2014) to study internal transparency, focussing on university budgeting as a key management tool.

This study investigates the transparency of budgets by examining its relationship with financial sustainability, which is a central area of research in the public-sector context.

Referring to the public value framework, a large sample of 110 countries has been investigated, implementing econometric models where the dependent variable is the Open Budget Index (OBI), published by the International Budget Partnership (IBP), and the test variables are different indicators of financial sustainability.

The results that emerge from the analysis suggest that budget transparency could be positively associated with the financial sustainability of governments, beyond the traditional aims of enhancing citizens' trust and participation.

This research offers important insights for policy areas, suggesting that improving budget transparency could be beneficial for public administrations because of the positive association with financial sustainability.

The purpose of this paper is an investigation of internal transparency in government budgeting.

A case study which uses mixed methods – documentary analysis, some observation and elite interviews.

Politicians do not want transparency. Despite the way in which the idea of transparency in government is beyond open challenge, this study reveals the manner in which politicians can inhibit and limit transparency through political will and action.

These findings raise serious challenges for policymakers who design government budgeting systems. They should raise concerns among other interested parties, including the media, the electorate and oversight bodies.

Are government budgets rigorously scrutinised? This evidence suggests not. This has major implications for accountants in government and for those who seek to use this information.

This research needs to be extended beyond the case of a government body – the Scottish Parliament – which was designed for and committed to transparency in its activities. For those public service organisations which have no such commitment, is public accountability achievable?

This study uses a novel lens of three levels of transparency as devised by Biondi and Lapsley (2014). It focuses on an emergent field of internal transparency in government budgeting.

Much of the current U.S. academic literature on participatory budgeting is preoccupied with direct citizen involvement in budget formulation, reflecting a particular normative theory of democracy. In this essay we suggest that U.S. academics can learn from a contemporary international community of practice concerned with “civil-society budget work”-a quasi-grassroots, quasi-pluralist movement with member organizations throughout the developing world-as well as from the budget exhibits mounted by the New York Bureau of Municipal Research at the turn of the last century. The budget-work movement employs third-party intermediation and advocacy, through all phases of the budget cycle. U.S. academics and budget-work practitioners can learn from each other, and this represents an unexploited opportunity for all concerned. We propose a program of locally based action research and trans-local evaluative synthesis.

The purpose of this paper is to apply Moore’s public value model into the context of e-government research by examining online financial transparency as both an organizational goal and as a driving force for financial sustainability and public officials’ corruption. The empirical context comprises the state governments in the USA.

Structural equation modeling is used to examine the relationship between specific contextual factors of the authorizing environment, financial sustainability, public official corruption and online budget transparency.

The results show that contextual factors like population explain online financial transparency, while financial sustainability and corruption had moderating and negative effects.

Governments that struggle with issues of financial sustainability and corruption will rely more on online financial transparency. Transparency increases detection of public corruption.

The effects of financial transparency and financial sustainability on corruption have been studied separately. This study fills the gap of understanding the effects of both on corruption as one phenomenon.

The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of transparency on the political budget cycle (PBC) over time and across countries. So far, the literature on electoral cycles finds evidence that cycles depend on the stage of an economy. However, the author shows – for the first time – a reliance of the budget cycle on transparency. The author uses a new data set consisting of 99 developing and 34 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries. First, the author develops a model and demonstrates that transparency mitigates the political cycles. Second, the author confirms the proposition through the econometric assessment. The author uses time series data from 1970 to 2014 and discovers smaller cycles in countries with higher transparency, especially G8 countries.

Mathematical model and a respective econometric model testing.

First, the author shows in the theoretical model that higher transparency mitigates the PBC. Second, the author confirms the theoretical proposition through the econometric model. The author confirms that the countries with higher transparency have smaller budget cycles. Or technically, the author cannot reject the null-hypothesis that the budget cycles are different due to transparency.

As explained in the paper: one issue is the data limitations in respect to the transparency measures. Data for Google are just available since 2004. Data for broadband-subscription are just on annual frequency. But both limitations can be tackled in the future. Hence, the findings are first evidence and a benchmark for future studies.

First, higher public transparency implies smaller budget cycles. In the end, this enhances the stability of economic and fiscal policy. Second, policy-makers have to consider the impact of higher transparency in respect to future election pledges. In a more transparent world, all voters can easily check the commitment of previous election pledges.

Transparency helps to improve democracy and thus enhances the political credibility because it allows the voters to check the commitment of the elected policy-makers.

First, the author shows – for the first time – a reliance of the budget cycle on transparency. Second, the author is the first that build a new theoretical model that extends the existing literature in respect to transparency and the size of the budget cycle. Third, the author uses for the first time – in this literature – new internet-based data such as broadband-subscription and Google search data. Fourth, the author empirically proves the new hypothesis based on the new data sources.

In August 2015, the Government Accounting Standards Board (GASB) adopted Statement 77, requiring government disclosure in audited financial reports of a particular type of tax expenditure, tax abatements. GASB's reporting standards move tax abatements from a budgetary environment to an accounting environment. This paper evaluates GASB 77's provisions to encourage an early and on-going dialogue about the Statement's prospects for achieving greater transparency compared to existing tax expenditure reporting efforts. We conclude that GASB 77 will be most beneficial to consumers of financial information in medium and large jurisdictions where there is no alternative tax abatement disclosure platform, or where the alternative offers less transparency than what can be achieved through financial reporting.

Making citizens able to monitor and evaluate public spending activities is a fundamental issue in public financial management literature. The purpose of this paper is to analyze whether fiscal transparency, measured by the Open Budget Index, has an effect on public spending performance, measured by the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report data.

Research methods rely on random-effects panel regression models on a country-level panel data set of 82 world countries observed in the 2008–2015 time interval.

Results show that the potential positive effects of fiscal transparency are mediated by the level of democracy of the country. In detail, in democratic countries, a higher degree of disclosure of fiscal information is correlated with a higher efficiency of government spending while, in non-democratic countries, fiscal transparency does not seem to provide any effect.

The results suggest that fiscal transparency can be a powerful device where politicians can be held accountable for their actions, while it could fail to provide positive results where a strong and effective vertical accountability is missing.

The novelty of the paper is twofold. First, it provides new additional evidence about the positive effect that fiscal transparency has on public spending efficiency by advancing previous research on this topic (Porumbescu, 2017; Montes et al., 2019). Second, the paper investigates conceptually and empirically how the positive effect on public spending efficiency determined by fiscal transparency depends on the degree of democracy present in the institutional environment in which fiscal information disclosure is implemented.