Open Budget And Anti-corruption

Corruption has lots of bad influences such as disturbing social order, violating social atmosphere, squandering public wealth and bringing damage on public interest. As to the Principal-Agent Theory, the authority of the government is from the people. However, owing to asymmetric information, the government always abused the authority to pursue their private interest and ignored the public interest. The public detested corruption deeply, and lose trust in the government. Massive anti-corruption campaign has been carried out by most governments to regain the confidence of citizens. The reason of corruption is complicated, rooting in the deep historical tradition and cultural background etc. Restraining the corruption from the source has been accepted by more and more scholars along with the development of the anti-corruption theory. According to political theory, the principle about the formation of corruption is that corruption is the product of interaction between motivation and opportunity to corrupt. Based on this principle, restraining the opportunity of corruptions can be the key point of anti-corruption system since the motivation of corruption is hard to control.As we all know, the government is the subject of social administration, and each factional activity of government can’t work without income and expenditure. What’s more, all the income and expenditure are from the public because the government is non-profit. If we can make every item of income and expenditure into the public budget, and attach corresponding government activities and information, then every person can supervise the activities of government properly and the execution of the authority legally by monitoring preparation and implementation of open budget information. Thus it can conclude that budget opening can restrict the way of the authority action, so that to squeeze the public power space of corruption. However, it’s not certain that this assumption works in the reality. This study focuses on this problem and starts with analyzing the international experience. It’s shown that although OBI (published by International Transparency) and CPI (published by International budget partnership) are moderately and positively correlated according to the analysis by SPSS, negative correlation still exists in some countries. This suggests the difficulty of eradicating the corruption at one stroke through the budget opening. As concluded by Robert D. Putnam in his famous writing 《Making Democracy Work》, social environment and history profoundly affects effectiveness of the system. Moreover, noticeable effect of budget opening needs times since it always develops slowly due to the special social environment and cultural traditions of the country as the system. It can be drawn from the study on the political and economic background of these countries that the conditions including the mature democratic system and high level economic development are fundamental to make the budget opening possible to against corruption. Following discussion also demonstrates the collapse of positive correlation between budget opening and incorruptness in China. Through analysis of the effectiveness of system and the conditions of social politics and economics, it’s found that the effective anti-corruption mechanism has not been established in China due to the lack of supporting conditions for the budget opening to eradicate the corruptions. It’s concluded from both positive and negative experience that the anti-corruption mechanism for budget opening is the result of the interactions of multiple factors including the traditions, democratic atmosphere, economic development as well as the government’s responsibility. Moreover, five necessary conditions consisting of detailed budget documents, complete legal system, public participation, scientific techniques and revolutionary thoughts have been proposed based on the successful experience in other countries.Methods of literature, quantitative, comparative study of history and so on have been used in this study to deeply discuss on the problem of correlation between the budget opening and the corruption from the views of criterion and evidence. The innovation of this study is to intuitively demonstrate the relationship by analyzing two groups of data from home and abroad based on the theories and to further investigate the mechanism and essential conditions for budget opening to restrain the corruptions, making this study more operational and practical.