Paths to Fiscal Transparency: Control, Knowledge and Communication in Early-Modern Polities

Abstract

Paradoxically, it is at a time when transparency is hailed as a key to good governance and economic efficiency, and when national states and transnational agencies are implementing new laws to allow citizens broader access to information, that a series of crises and scandals, sometimes revealed by whistle-blowers, have revealed the extent to which use of the concept can be problematic and, perhaps, even fraught. Before the global financial crisis of 2008, academic literature had already start...