As a part of the public governance, transparency started to come forward during the New Public Management reforms, mostly for the evaluation of public sector efficiency. This article focuses on online local budget transparency (OLBT) in two neighbouring countries – Croatia and Slovenia. The article is pioneering in a comparative study of the determinants of budget transparency in the Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, based on a unique database and measure of transparency. The article tests the determinants of OLBT that reflect the accountability of local authorities and a cornerstone for public participation in the budget process. The following methodology was applied: using a data set of 768 Slovenian and Croatian local governments over the 2015–2017 period and testing it against several financial and socio-economic variables, and a random effects panel logistic regression, separately for Croatia, Slovenia, and a pooled sample. The results indicate that greater size of the population, higher administrative capacity and lower unemployment rate in individual local governments significantly contribute to higher levels of OLBT. This study demonstrates the possibility of developing a standardised measure of local budget transparency and using it to investigate the reasons for different levels of transparency in the two – and potentially other – CEE countries. The results of this and similar studies can serve as a basis for establishing cohesive local budget transparency policies for different countries and creating a combination of policy instruments to enhance transparency.

Environmental regulations bring social benefits and contribute to lessening environmental damage. At the same time, due to the rapidly changing and complex environmental legislation, businesses incur costs, including administrative burdens. The article presents quantitative evidence on the factors that affect the compliance costs of environmental regulations. For this purpose, we used a binary model of logistic regression with the following predictors: enterprise characteristics, the relevance of environmental regulations for business operations, and the impact of environmental stimulus measures on compliance costs. The results of the study suggest that medium-sized enterprises are less likely to experience the environmental administrative burden than small enterprises. However, no difference has been found between large and small enterprises. Further, we show that environmental consents are an important determinant of the environmental administrative burden and that financial environmental measures can have a positive impact thereon.

In consideration of the fact that public administrations worldwide face a number of challenges, many governments are dedicated to improving the ethical climate in public administrations. The same issue is also the focus of the attention of many transnational associations. The basic goal is to ensure the development of comparable ethical climates, ethical behaviour in different public administrations and to develop comparable, suitable ethics infrastructures to enable this. Modern public administrations must bring ethical conduct to the fore and resist unethical behaviour. There are different ideas on how to build ethics infrastructures in public administrations, and examples of good practice that could facilitate the development of such infrastructures are found in the public and private sectors of different countries. In this paper, we connect ethics infrastructures and ethical climates. The evaluation of Slovenia’s ethics infrastructures is based on the framework prepared by the OECD, using its questionnaire developed by Victor and Cullen. The results show that there is no general relationship between ethics infrastructures and ethical climates in public administrations. Nevertheless, some determinants of ethics infrastructures correlate to a high degree to the ethical climate, the strongest impact on ethics climates being the ethical infrastructure’s determinant “public involvement and scrutiny”.

Recent developments in local public finance management in Slovenia indicate the local governments’ growing interest in introducing participatory budgeting as a decision-making tool, wherein part of local resources are used with citizen participation. Usually, the literature on participation budgeting analyses its effects, but our main research objective was to analyze the possible determinants influencing its implementation. The influence of political factors, sociodemographic factors, economic factors, and the capability of municipalities are examined here using binary logistic regression to predict a dichotomous dependent variable from a set of predictor variables. In binary logistic regression, predictable variables are the probability of one category being chosen. In this case, the authors calculated the probability that a municipality, described by selected prediction variables, would implement a participatory budget. The results of the analysis suggest six indicators that impact the probability of participatory budgeting adoption, proving the influence of four determinants on the decision to adopt such a measure.

Required competencies in public administration study programs