This publication presents the papers discussed at the Latin American Forum on Ensuring Transparency and Accountability in the Public Sector that took place on 5-6 December 2001. The Forum approved policy recommendations that reflect the shared experience of Member countries of the OECD and the OAS.

This publication presents the papers discussed at the Latin American Forum on Ensuring Transparency and Accountability in the Public Sector that took place on 5-6 December 2001. The Forum approved policy recommendations that reflect the shared experience of Member countries of the OECD and the OAS.

Transparency in government operations is widely regarded as an important precondition for macroeconomic fiscal sustainability, good governance, and overall fiscal rectitude. Notably, the Interim Committee, at its April and September 1996 meetings, stressed the need for greater fiscal transparency. Prompted by these concerns, this paper represents a first attempt to address many of the aspects of transparency in government operations. It provides an overview of major issues in fiscal transparency and examines the IMF's role in promoting transparency in government operations.

Governments fail to provide the public goods needed for development when its leaders knowingly and deliberately ignore sound technical advice or are unable to follow it, despite the best of intentions, because of political constraints. This report focuses on two forces—citizen engagement and transparency—that hold the key to solving government failures by shaping how political markets function. Citizens are not only queueing at voting booths, but are also taking to the streets and using diverse media to pressure, sanction and select the leaders who wield power within government, including by entering as contenders for leadership. This political engagement can function in highly nuanced ways within the same formal institutional context and across the political spectrum, from autocracies to democracies. Unhealthy political engagement, when leaders are selected and sanctioned on the basis of their provision of private benefits rather than public goods, gives rise to government failures. The solutions to these failures lie in fostering healthy political engagement within any institutional context, and not in circumventing or suppressing it. Transparency, which is citizen access to publicly available information about the actions of those in government, and the consequences of these actions, can play a crucial role by nourishing political engagement.

Includes the following papers: Fostering Dialogue to Strengthen Good Governance / Seiichi Kondo -- Preventing Corruption in the Americas / Cesar Gaviria (and more ... )

The public sector continues to play a strategic role across the world and in the last thirty years there have been major shifts in approaches to its management. This text identifies the trends in public management and the effects these have had, as well as providing a broad overview to each topic.

This report examines the influence of trust on policy making and explores some of the steps governments can take to strengthen public trust.

In Tax, Inequality, and Human Rights, experts in human rights law and in tax law debate the linkages between the two fields and highlight how each can help to tackle rapidly growing inequality in the economic, social, and political realms. Against a backdrop of systemic corporate tax avoidance, widespread use of tax havens, persistent pressures to embrace austerity policies, and growing gaps between the rich and poor, this book encourages readers to understand fiscal policy as human rights policy, and thus as having profound consequences for the well-being of citizens around the world. Prominent scholars and practitioners examine how the foundational principles of tax law and human rights law intersect and diverge; discuss the cross-border nature and human rights impacts of abusive practices like tax avoidance and evasion; question the reluctance of states to bring transparency and accountability to tax policies and practices; highlight the responsibility of private sector actors for shaping and misshaping tax laws; and critically evaluate domestic tax rules through the lens of equality and nondiscrimination. The contributing authors also explore how international human rights obligations should influence the framework for both domestic and international tax reforms. They address what human rights law requires of state tax policies and how tax laws and loopholes affect the enjoyment of human rights by people outside a state's borders. Because tax and human rights both turn on the relationship between the individual and the state, neo-liberalism's erosion of the social contract threatens to undermine them both.