Comparative Approach to Municipal Transparency: Which Index Best Assesses Compliance in Spain?

Transparency in public entities has been an issue that has attracted great attention from academics in recent years, and on which there has been a significant regulatory effort, both internationally and in the national legislations of the different countries. Given the diversity of proposed transparency measurement indices for public entities in the previous literature, it could be understood that research in this field has so far not provided fully satisfactory results to measure, evaluate, and compare transparency practices in the entities. This would justify the need to continue investigating in this field, taking as a reference the active disclosure obligations set out in the legislation. The objective of this work focuses on the evaluation of the transparency of Spanish local authorities with a population of more than 175,000 inhabitants, using a Transparency Index constructed from the items included in the standardised programme of the Spanish Court of Audit, and its comparison with the results achieved using the Bidimensional Transparency Index (BTI). It can be concluded that different methodologies from various regulators lead to distinct evaluations, as demonstrated by the application of the Li test in this study. The main contribution of this paper is the proposal of an index that provides a summary measure of the level of compliance with all the aspects that the Court of Audit considers fundamental in relation to compliance with the LTAIBG with respect to the obligation of active publicity of local entities. This index would make it possible to complement with a “summary” score the content of the audit reports of the CoA, which would provide a clearer view of the level of compliance of local entities, as well as a comparison with other comparable entities in terms of size, thus favouring “competition” among them, which could lead to an improvement in the levels of compliance with the active disclosure obligations established in the law.