Twenty years of transparency research

With applications in financial, regulatory, monetary, and fiscal policy, and with the World Bank, IMF, OECD, and many other NGOs advising on best practices, fiscal transparency has become a major theme of contemporary research in political economy and public administration. It was not always so. Even though the connection between transparency and corruption prevention was understood by the ancient Athenians, the connection with democracy at least since 1689, and the importance of bookkeeping and auditing practices in economic development even earlier, there was little academic interest in the causes and consequences of transparency. An important stimulus to academic thought was Holmstrm (1979), with 10,000+ citations. One could weave a narrative through three subsequent streams of analysis -institutions, corruption, and debt -in academia with real-world developments from Watergate, the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the founding of Transparency International, some aggressive lobbying by US firms, to the FCPA Amendments and OECD Convention of 1997-98. However, even though the 1990s saw increased attention to information, opportunism, and verification and the path-breaking publication of Mauro (1995, also 10,000+ citations), there was essentially no mention of "transparency". It is no longer so.