The relationship between public transparency and fiscal management in Brazilian municipalities
Public Transparency; Fiscal Management; Municipalities; Panel Data.
Since the late twentieth century, the management of public resources was highlighted as a result of high levels of public debt, compromising the performance of actions and activities essential to promote a better quality of social life. The Fiscal Responsibility Law (LRF) established that a public agent should be based on the pillars of planning, control, accountability and transparency to achieve good management of public resources, thus favoring the quality of fiscal management. Among these pillars, transparency should be of fundamental importance to fiscal discipline, since it provides all citizens with access to the information of the actions practiced by the rulers. The present study analyzed the effect of public transparency on the performance of fiscal management in Brazilian municipalities, based on a panel data model for 2015 and 2016. The results did not show a positive and significant relationship between general and disaggregated public transparency (active and passive transparency) on the performance of fiscal management for the entire sample. However, it revealed that general public transparency and active transparency presented positively related in municipalities with a population between 50 and 100 thousand inhabitants. Finally, only the Northeast region presented a significant and negative relationship between active transparency and fiscal management, contrary to what as expected.