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The Right to Know: Transparency for an Open World resources

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some. One notable victory for transparency came in the form of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, first passed in 1966 and strength- ened in 1974. In the 1980s, transnational networks of civil society activists launched campaigns demanding information from inter- governmental organizations, particularly the World Bank. East and West negotiated some arms control agreements that included veri- fication provisions that made the security establishments of the two sides increasingly transparent to each other. But the real explosion of global demands for disclosure came in the 1990s. Early in that decade, only around a dozen countries had laws providing for public access to government-held information. These were largely the established democracies of the English-speak- ing world and Scandinavia. Ever since, however, adopting disclosure laws and policies has become something of an international fad. As of 2006, the total is on the order of 70 countries, with more adopting such laws all the time.10 The new additions include countries with vary- ing levels of democratic traditions and varying degrees of economic ad- vancement. All found themselves pressed by the spread of democratic norms, the increasing strength of civil society organizations, and the rise of increasingly independent media around the world to agree to release vastly more information to their citizens than ever before. At the same time, global economic integration led international investors (and the governments of capital-rich countries) to demand disclosures on corporate and national accounts in emerging econo- mies, especially in the wake of the 1990s Asian crisis, which many blamed on excessive secrecy by Asian corporations and governments. International financial institutions—the World Bank and the Inter- national Monetary Fund—which are major promoters of economic integration, began demanding information from their member gov- ernments and then posting it on Web sites. Those institutions them- selves faced intense pressure from activists around the world to open up their analyses and processes of decision making. In the late 1990s, with the American economy soaring and eco- nomic crises plaguing markets in Asia, Russia, and Latin America, the American system of corporate disclosure—the rules govern- ing accounting and auditing, the professionalism of auditors, the conventions of corporate governance that emphasized detailed and timely financial reporting to investors—was heralded as a model for the rest of the world. With the outbreak of corporate scandals  introduction: the battle over transparency

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