The dissertation is dedicated to solving the scientific problem, which is to improve the scientific and methodological approaches to ensure the transparency of fiscal policy in the context of financial decentralization of territories.
The author's definition of "financial decentralization" is formed, which is a multifaceted concept that provides a system of an authority transfer from the state level to the local level with the simultaneous provision of appropriate income sources for local budgets to cover the needs of socio-economic development.
The key characteristics of the budget process transparency are identified, which are the timeliness, completeness, systematization, social importance and relevance of the disclosure of tax and budget information for public.
The author suggests new categorization for transparency assessment tools, which are divided into three groups in accordance with the scale of application, specificity, assessment tools: reviews and indices, initiatives, official standards and norms.
The thesis provides the scientific and methodological approach to construct an index of institutional conditions of financial decentralization as an integral indicator created on the basis of 6 key indices: government effectiveness, regulatory quality, control of corruption, corruption perceptions index, tax burden, government spending.
The study proposed the improved scientific and methodological approach to assessing the degree of financial decentralization at the macro and micro levels by calculating an integral indicator of financial decentralization with further ranking based on certain ranges. This approach allows to determine the overall dynamics of changes in the state of the budget system.
The scientific and methodological approach to determining the forecast level of social development expenditures of local budgets was improved. It is based on the construction of a linear exponential smoothing model by the Brown-Mayer method and estimation of the forecast trend based on linear model quality indicators (linear prediction error, root mean square error, Tayle mismatch coefficient), which allows to develop long-term financial plans to balance the planned amount of own income resources and the projected amount of social development expenditures, taking into account transfer revenues from the state budget.
The existence of correlations between indicators of the local budgets state and the level of socio-economic development based on an improved scientific and methodological approach, which uses correlation analysis tools, was substantiated. It was investigated that in the period 2018-2020 the set of significant correlations of budget indicators with the level of socio-economic development has stabilized to two main ones: the coefficient of tax effort and the index of tax capacity.
The model of estimating the level of financial provision has been improved by determining the annual integral indicator of united territorial communities by the method of additive convolution and the average integral indicator for the period based on a system of indicators generalized to groups of financial stability by income, expenditure, taxes and transfers. Determining the optimal number of evaluation indicators was carried out by the method of principal components, which allowed ranking the community budgets by level of financial provision based on certain ranges of intervals, considering a statistically significant set of indicators.
The author improved the scientific and methodological approach to modeling the dependence between public finance, corruption and transparency at the macro and micro levels based on the use of a panel data structure represented by macroeconomic indicators and public finance state indicators in the regional aspect using the Multiple indicators – multiple cause model at the macro-level (MIMIC) and the Dynamic multiple indicators – multiple cause model at the micro level (DYMIMIC), which allowed to build regression models with fixed and random individual effects.
The model for assessing the impact of corruption and lack of transparency on the state of public finances development at the macro level indicated the importance of the economic freedom index, ease of doing business index and corruption perception index in total Ukrainian consolidated budget expenditures changing.
At the micro level the budget transparency indicator did not show significance in the conditions of the chosen model. However, it should be noted that there are other exogenous factors that are not included in the model, and therefore the role of open budgets at the micro level, simplification of regulations, increased public participation should be further investigated. At the micro level the indicators of the share of local budget expenditures in GRP, GRP per capita, and the unemployment rate turned out to be significant.
