The Determinants of Fiscal Transparency in Vietnamese Local Governments

Abstract

There are few studies on the determinants of fiscal transparency in Vietnamese local governments, and most of them are qualitative studies of a few special cases and do not cover theoretically relevant factors changing over time. The main objective of this study was to examine the impacts of fiscal, demographic and political factors on fiscal transparency by using a fixed-effects model on panel data from 63 local governments in Vietnam from 2017 to 2020. The results indicate that local government expenditure, taxes and population size are positively associated with fiscal transparency, while fiscal surplus and intergovernmental grants negatively affect fiscal transparency. Our empirical findings emphasize the importance of citizens’ and policymakers’ roles in supervising Vietnamese local governments’ financial information, given the existence of fiscal illusions and agency problems.