Transparency and Performance in the Italian Large Municipalities

In this paper, we aim at evaluating from an economic perspective the recent Italian regulation on transparency to investigate its relationship with the performance of the public sector. We address the following questions: is the degree of administrative transparency somehow related with the performance? Is it likely that municipalities showing a better performance are also more transparent? Using large Italian municipalities as a case study, through the joint analysis of a new transparency indicator built by Galli et al. (2017) and of rather new official data on local governments performance, we provide some preliminary evidence that the degree of transparency is related to the performance. [Publisher's text].