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 whether the potentialities of transparency as a tool to foster accountability and improve the performance of public administrations, are fully exploited. We try to answer the following question: is the degree of transparency somehow related with its performance? Is it likely that municipalities with a better performance are also more transparent? Using large Italian municipalities as a case study, some preliminary hints are obtained from the joint analysis of a new transparency indicator built by Galli et al. (2017) and the performance indicators provided by SOSE.