Open Public Finance

With the outbreak of the COVID pandemic, many governments around the world face serious fiscal difficulties. The deteriorating fiscal condition is a critical concern, as it suggests that governments will have limited resources to address important issues of our time. Greater fiscal transparency can help governments address these fiscal challenges by fostering a well-informed debate about policy reforms and holding public finance institutions accountable with timely and accurate information. We also believe comparative analysis of public finance can elicit practical insights into how governments can reform their systems. In this article, we introduce a tool, Open Public Finance, which helps us analyze and visualize public finances in comparative perspective. We then present several examples of our comparative analyses, which may help readers understand how the tool can be utilized to produce meaningful insights. A beta version of Open Public Finance is available online (https://open-public-finance.streamlit.app).