Morocco meets the minimum requirements for financial transparency, according to a report from the US State Department.
Released on Friday, the report assesses 141 countries in terms of financial transparency in the course of 2021, judging that only 72 countries meet the minimum requirements for financial transparency, while 69 fell short of making the list.
As the State Department defines the minimum requirements for financial transparency as a government’s commitment to disclose to the public records key budget documents the report’s findings suggest that Morocco has made notable progress on the public transparency front.
At the same time, the US report’s conclusion on Morocco’s fiscal transparency echo previous reports highlighting Morocco’s recent advances in terms of making state budget details accessible to the public.
In a report published in March of this year, the non-profit International Budget Partnership concluded that Morocco’s state budget is the second most transparent among Arab countries, following Jordan.
Assigning Morocco a 48 score out of 100 in fiscal transparency, the non-profit ranked Morocco as the world’s 32nd most transparent country in terms of disclosing details of state budgets to the general public.
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Despite its advanced regional ranking, Morocco’s current budget transparency score puts the North African kingdom in the category of countries with “limited information available.”
The report further lauded Morocco’s commitment to disclosing records on gender-related expenditures, adding that the kingdom is among a short list of 14 countries with public records on gender dimension to the state budget.
Recently, the International Monetary Fund maintained that fiscal transparency is crucial to stimulate better economic governance and support efforts to address corruption.
This means Morocco’s relatively encouraging performance on budget transparency indexes highlights the country’s genuine efforts to tackle what some observers have described as a deeply entrenched culture of institutional corruption.
SOURCE: Morocco News
