Is Transparency the Best Disinfectant?
A Meta-Analysis of the Effect of TransparencyAccording to OGP’s Articles of Governance, transparency occurs when “government-held information (including on activities and decisions) is open, comprehensive, timely, freely available to the pub... More on Government Corruption
by Can Chen, Ph.D. and Sukumar Ganapati, Ph.D.
Transparency is widely recognized as an anti-corruption strategy. Research on the link between transparency and corruption has burgeoned since the 1990s. We conducted a meta-analysis of 56 empirical studies to estimate the overall effect size of transparency on corruption. The analysis shows that that transparency has a significant, though small, overall effect size in reducing government corruption. While legal transparency with freedom of information laws are important, the effect size is substantially larger with fiscal transparency and e-transparency.
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