Natural Resources and Violent Conflict - WaterWiki.net

who gets the money? 61Box 3.1 The Azerbaijan ROSCThe ROSC refers to problems of tax administration and tax arrears ofmany large state enterprises, including SOCAR, the state oil company.The report from 2000 admits that transparency could be improved:“Although information is not secret, there does not seem to be astrong commitment to regularly publish fiscal data of a comprehensivenature.”According to IMF staff commentary, some of the top priorities forAzerbaijan are to “develop a medium-term budget framework to takeinto account future income from oil resources and to set developmentpriorities [and] ensure that the operations of the Oil Fund will betransparent.”Source: IMF (2000).ROSC that are relevant to the issue of transparency of natural resourcerevenues.The impact of the fiscal transparency code and ROSC depends onthe participation of member countries. In some cases, the IMF has putpressure on governments with an IMF program to undertake a ROSC,and in others it has placed some conditionality on ROSC recommendations.The problem is that countries with large resource revenuesare, by definition, less likely to have an economic incentive to participatein IMF programs.Even if a country undertakes a ROSC, publication is voluntary. Asof April 2002, ROSCs had been completed for 76 countries (not necessarilyincluding all modules). Of these, reports for 59 countries werepublished. The IMF notes that the bulk of ROSC modules completedsince January 1, 2002, have been for transition, developing, andemerging market countries (IMF 2002). However, among the countriesthat published the module on fiscal transparency, the list of developingcountries with significant natural resources is short. The IMFargues that publishing ROSCs should remain voluntary to increasecooperation and country ownership in the process.As long as ROSCs are published, there should be opportunities forthe public to use the information. According to the IMF website,ROSCs are “used to help sharpen the institutions’ policy discussionswith national authorities, and in the private sector (including by ratingagencies) for risk assessment.” 18 There is at least one confirmed exampleof the fiscal transparency code being used by nongovernmental