GOVERNMENT TRANSPARENCY AS UKRAINIAN TERRITORIAL COMMUNITIES’ ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT FACTOR

Abstract

The present paper substantiates the government transparency issue's importance as a fundamental principle of management and exercise of power on the local level. It must become a dominant one for Ukrainian urban territorial communities’ socio-economic development regulation under the condition of further steps implementation aimed at strengthening administrative and financial decentralization processes. We elucidate specific characteristics of government transparency measuring global practice, in particular, by applying a methodological approach to the city transparency index calculation, which has been conducted since the end of the 20th century by the NGO "Transparency International". We formulated and tested hypotheses about the relationship presence between government transparency level, income from the payment of personal income tax and local tax by the population, as well as the number of people who voted for public budget projects. We chose Ukrainian cities with different ranking positions by the government transparency level to conduct a measurement. The study proved that the local government transparency level is an important factor in Ukraine’s urban territorial communities’ socio and economic development. We defined that cities’ industrial specialization and their economic diversification level do not influence significantly the correlation density between government transparency level and local budgets' revenues. Additionally, most cities, regardless of their size, are characterized by a high correlation between indicators of transparency and the public activity of residents. Also, we observed a tendency for citizens’ activity to rise in the most investigated communities. The obtained results demonstrated the need to choose a longer time lag to test the proposed hypotheses. Nevertheless, the proven hypotheses made it possible to identify problems in ensuring the transparency of territorial communities’ authorities and to formulate proposals for improving public administration efficiency.

Keywords

• government transparency
• public authorities’ openness
• cities’ transparency rating
• local budgets
• participation budget projects