Abstract: It is required in the reports of the 19th National Congress of CPC and the new Budget Law that the government departments at all levels shall further improve budget transparency, and make specific provisions on budget openness and transparency. Will the improvement in budget transparency restrain local fiscal expenditure and improve local fiscal expenditure performance? By employing the synthetic control method, this paper tries to evaluate the influence of non-transparent budget on local fiscal expenditure performance by taking the events of unpublicized budget and final accounting information in Fujian Province in 2014 and 2015 as the natural experiments. The results show that it can be more objective and quantitative to evaluate the policy effect of budget transparency on local fiscal expenditure performance by simulating the fiscal expenditure performance before budget openness through weighing the multiple controlled objects. The findings show that there is a positive correlation between budget transparency and local fiscal expenditure performance. Compared with other provinces, an un-fully transparent budget can make the fiscal expenditure performance decline. Therefore, in order to improve budget transparency, it is necessary to actively promote the process of information disclosure at the grassroots units, give full play to the budget review and supervision functions of the people's congress, build a budget expenditure standard system as soon as possible, and expand the participation of the public in budget supervision.

Key words: budget openness, budget transparency, local financial expenditure performance, synthetic control method