Business Case for Transparency
- Lead PI:
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Unit Affiliation: Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment (CCSI)
- Unknown start date - Ongoing
- Active
- North America ; Europe ; United States ; United Kingdom
- Project Type: Research
DESCRIPTION: CCSI strongly supports the transparency of contracts and tax flows. CCSI shares the belief of many stakeholders that transparency is essential to leverage extractive industries for sustainable development and is in the mutual interest of all stakeholders. However, some industry players continue to voice the concern that increased transparency would be harmful for their business. Therefore, CCSI is working to also establish the business case for transparency.
OUTCOMES: To show how data available from increased revenue transparency can be used, CCSI in collaboration with PWYP-US and the Quantitative Methods in Social Sciences Program at Columbia University held a two-day data dive event on November 17-18, 2017. At the event students explored newly available data to test the relationship between transparency, company performance, government revenue collection and governance indicators. The questions and datasets used for the data dive are available on the event website. The findings will inform future research of CCSI and PWYP-US.
Alongside growing revenue and contract transparency, increasing model transparency is needed. Only with financial model transparency can relevant actors better assess whether contracts are balanced in terms of fiscal returns and understand when revenues start flowing to the government. CCSI strongly supports financial model transparency and has developed two open fiscal models.
CCSI is also actively contributing to the movements for greater contract transparency and fiscal model transparency.