Contract Transparency Campaign
A meaningful revenue transparency initiative leads to monitoring by local communities, continuing efforts to eradicate corruption, and ultimately to a reduction in poverty. This comprehensive approach requires more than the publication of payments by companies and receipts by countries. If citizens are to know whether such payments and receipts reflect a fair deal, the contracts on which they are based must be made transparent as well. Unfortunately, the widespread use of confidentiality clauses often protects oil, gas, and mineral contracts from this much-needed disclosure.
RWI is actively engaged in an international effort to promote greater contract transparency, through both research and advocacy. We are supporting a comparative study on regulatory and contractual restraints on transparency in order to better understand the balance of interests surrounding such constraints. RWI is also supporting the Publish What You Pay coalition in its efforts to embed contract disclosure requirements in US and international legislation.
Revenue Transparency
The linkages between resource wealth, poverty, conflict and corruption–the so-called "resource curse"–are well documented. Public information and public accountability are the best guarantee that a country's resource wealth will translate into lasting benefits for its citizens over time.
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Expenditure Transparency
It is impossible to ensure proper management of natural resource wealth by looking exclusively at revenues. Transparent and accountable management and expenditure of public funds is essential to addressing the poverty, corruption and autocracy that too often plague resource rich countries.
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Iraq
Iraq, a nation of 25 million people, holds the second largest oil reserves in the world. But the pervasive violence, mismanagement and abuse of recent years have denied its people any lasting benefits from this wealth.
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Peru
Overall, Peru performs much better than many resource abundant countries in both revenue and expenditure transparency, thanks to a legal framework that guarantees citizens access to basic information about oil, gas and mining revenues and their distribution and usage.
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PUBLICATIONS
 Escaping the Resource CurseToo often, developing nations with natural resource wealth face greater conflict, corruption, and poverty than developing nations without an abundance of oil, gas or minerals. There are solutions to this "resource curse," but not without fundamental political changes.Read more about Escaping the Resource Curse and order copies online ... |