Geographic Information Systems: Should They Be Used in Public Finance Reform Development?

Abstract

Public finance reform is one of the most complex areas of decision-making. It requires proper implementing methodology and tools for visualizing possible results of reform in a society. The purpose of this article is to show how geographic information systems (GIS) can be used in the development of reform in the sphere of public finance. GIS could provide a wide range of analysis and better support for ideas of reforms. GIS is useful in cases of public finance reform because it makes it possible to combine statistical, demographical, and geographical analyses. Also, GIS provides necessary visualization that helps ordinary citizens to understand a proposed reform and its aftereffects. GIS can increase transparency and accountability of government, because it is quite difficult to manipulate open map data. The article provides examples of how GIS can be used to justify reforms in public finance, namely, optimizing funding for formal school education and health care. Data from Ukraine was used for the analysis. This choice is due to the presence of radical reforms in this country, citizens’ distrust of reforms, and lack of transparency of information about the activities of the public sector. GIS was used to test whether government reforms would comply with European standards of access to schooling and health care for all citizens. The results of the study show that such standards could not be achieved because the government did not take into account the low quality of infrastructure when developing reform programs. GIS is not a perfect tool and several challenges should be also considered. Firstly, the software for GIS must be revised quite often. Secondly, GIS software continues to change and improve over time and there are now several GIS applications that range from being relatively free (having limited tools) to being very expensive (for example, ArcGIS 10.). Thirdly, to follow the idea of increasing transparency, all GIS software should have no conflicts between each other. This means that data from one GIS software can be easily exported into different GIS applications.