Governments know exactly where public money goes. Citizens do not. This asymmetry is not a technical accident – it is a structural feature of how public financial management systems are designed. Existing transparency frameworks – the IMF Fiscal Transparency Code, the Open Budget Index, and the OECD Budget Transparency Toolkit – measure what governments choose to disclose. They do not make spending verifiable. This paper develops a deep transparency model that closes this gap. By connecting budget allocations to real-time execution data through tamper-resistant technologies – write-once, read-many (WORM) storage and blockchain – the model enables citizens to trace every public outlay to its final private recipient. Deep transparency shifts fiscal accountability from publication to verification. It reduces the discretionary space through which patronage, corruption, and state capture operate. The model is normative and conceptual, but the problem it addresses is real and the tools required to solve it exist.
The COVID-19 pandemic created an environment where rapidly changing policy interventions and heightened uncertainty substantially influenced individual behavioural responses. This study investigates the relationship between government mobility restrictions and public adherence in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia using mobility data and policy stringency indices. Focusing on the timeseries properties of behavioural adjustment, we evaluate whether individual responses converge towards policy objectives over time. In Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Slovenia, individuals initially exhibited stronger mobility reductions than implied by policy measures, consistent with temporary behavioural overreaction and heightened short-run risk sensitivity. In Serbia, behavioural responses initially remained below the level implied by policy restrictions, suggesting delayed behavioural adjustment and limited initial responsiveness to policy signals. More broadly, the findings indicate that behavioural responses to pandemic policy are dynamic, shaped by uncertainty and behavioural inertia, and sensitive to the frequency and complexity of policy changes
Technical difficulties associated with transaction-by-transaction taxation methods have led financial services to be exempt in most countries. Methods applying the value added tax to financial services attempt to address this issue. This paper expands existing knowledge by integrating these methods into a single, unique formulation. A unified framework for generalising and characterising these approaches is presented, facilitating a new classification based on either shadow or implicit prices. Furthermore, two new variants of the mobile-ratio method for individual transactions, utilising either shadow prices or “explicit-made” implicit prices, are derived. These variants improve and address critiques from previous methods.
The paper examines the risk-adjusted performance of pension funds for six countries based on country-level Sharpe ratios. Four of the countries are former transition economies (Croatia, Slovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria), which, together with Sweden, comprise the EU member states in the dataset. Chile is added as the sixth, non-EU member country to provide a more internationally balanced sample. Based on monthly data for the period from July 2015 to December 2024, the statistical significance of differences in Sharpe ratios is tested for the same risk-categories across countries and between risk-categories within each country. The Jobson-Korkie-Memmel, Opdyke and Ledoit-Wolf tests are performed. The results of empirical analysis suggest that the performance of pension funds in both A and B risk-categories is statistically significantly different only in instances when pairwise testing involves Croatia. When comparing risk-categories A and B within each country, a statistically significant difference is found only in Bulgaria.
The COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent economic recovery had a strong impact on government debt dynamics in the EU. This paper focuses on fiscal developments in the period 2021-2023, when the economic crisis triggered by the pandemic had already passed. In particular, it aims to determine whether the rapid reduction in government debt ratios in that period was driven by member states’ primary surpluses or a favourable snowball effect – the positive difference between member states’ nominal growth rates and the average interest rates on their debt. The analysis clearly reveals that the snowball effect was the key factor behind the favourable trend in debt ratios. The paper also discusses the challenges and adverse shocks that the EU faced in the post-pandemic period, which put pressure on national budgets and thus contributed to the persistence of primary deficits in that period.
