Fiscal transparency level of municipalities in Turkey and the determinants of fiscal transparency

The concept of fiscal transparency has gained great importance in international studies. Globalization and global economic crises, along with fiscal transparency, have made decentralization an important element of reform efforts in public administration. For this reason, fiscal transparency is an issue that needs to be emphasized in terms of local governments as well as in the central government. In the light of developments in the world, Turkey has begun to attach importance to the principle of decentralization and assigned more duties, powers, and responsibilities to local governments than in the past. The Public Financial Management and Control Law No. 5018 dated 2003 also aimed to provide fiscal transparency and accountability in public administration. The aim of the thesis is to determine the level of fiscal transparency of the municipalities in Turkey and analyze various factors that affect fiscal transparency. In this study, a country-specific fiscal transparency index to measure the level of fiscal transparency of the municipalities in Turkey have been created and 30 metropolitan and 51 provincial municipalities of corporate web sites were subjected to content analysis. After determining the fiscal transparency levels of the municipalities, the factors affecting the fiscal transparency were analyzed by multiple regression analysis method and group difference test. Findings show that the fiscal transparency level of 81 municipalities in Turkey is poor with an average of 33.00%. 24 of 81 municipalities have very poor, 22 are poor, 29 are medium and only 6 have good fiscal transparency. There is no municipality with very good fiscal transparency. In addition, the factors affecting the fiscal transparency of the municipalities were found to be municipal population size, population ratio over the age of sixty-five, the size of budget expenditures and the type of municipality.