Natural Resources and Violent Conflict - WaterWiki.net

who gets the money? 79expenditure reviews, such programs focus mainly on the expenditureand not the revenue side of public financial management.Making Government Transparency a Conditionfor Receiving Certain BenefitsIt is recommended that technical assistance include diagnostic use ofthe IMF’s fiscal transparency code and reports on the observance ofstandards and codes. Although opportunities to apply pressure to usethe fiscal transparency code are likely to be limited, developed countriescould make publication of a ROSC a condition for receiving certaintypes of aid or export credits.Since many resource-rich governments often borrow on commercialmarkets (presumably to avoid conditionalities associated with lessexpensive loans from multilateral development banks), encouraginginternational banks to make publication of a ROSC a condition forlending could be useful. This could be encouraged, for example, by theuse of a voluntary “white list” of banks, as suggested in chapter 5.Other more general conditionality approaches (beyond ROSC) mayalso be considered in bilateral (for example, the U.S. Foreign AppropriationsAct, as proposed by Global Witness) or multilateral contexts,taking into account the incentive problems noted and the generallymixed experience with conditionality as a policy tool.Coordinating Home-Country Reporting Rulesfor International Oil CompaniesDue to the (at least short-term) barriers to improving reporting proceduresof host governments, an alternative approach to bring moretransparency to natural resource–related revenue flows is to focus onreporting at other points in the flow. For example, many of the financialinflows to governments can be revealed by looking at the financialoutflows from the international oil and mining companies. 38Many host governments do not want companies to reveal howmuch they pay and may be in a position to penalize companies thatdo. This creates collective action problems, especially for voluntaryregimes or campaigns to pressure individual companies to be goodcorporate citizens. This could even lead to responsible companies leavinga difficult country and being replaced by less transparent firms overwhich the international community has little influence. For this reason,Global Witness and a number of others have concluded that the voluntaryapproach to revealing payments probably will not work.The Publish What You Pay campaign is calling for governments in developedcountries to require stock exchanges to demand full disclosure