Skopje, 13 September 2022 (MIA) - Deputy Prime Minister for Good Governance Policies Slavica Grkovska addressed Tuesday an online event on the topic "How open are the institutions in North Macedonia", organized by the Metamorphosis Foundation, which promoted the assessment of good governance in North Macedonia and the region through the openness index in the measurement for 2021. Addressing the event, Deputy Prime Minister Grkovska underscored the importance of transparency as a prerequisite for development and good governance. She said that over the past few years, the Government has taken significant steps to raise fiscal transparency, but also for transparency in general, and this was also recognized by civil society organizations, which ranked the Government first according to active transparency. Moreover, according to the U.S. Department of State’s 2022 Fiscal Transparency Report, North Macedonia is among the countries that meet the minimum requirements of fiscal transparency. “Transparency is an important factor in implementing successful anti-corruption policies. It enables citizens, civil society organizations as well as media representatives to receive information about the operation of the institutions more easily, quickly and efficiently, and thus to control their operation. This mainly refers to the spending of public funds and the use of state resources, as well as the overall operation,” Grkovska noted. Grkovska also said that huge progress in the area of transparency has been noted not only by the Government, but also by the institutions. As much as 81 percent of institutions improved transparency this year. Regarding fiscal transparency and public procurement, Deputy Prime Minister Grkovska said that all institutions are required to create a special tab on their web pages and to publish all data, from announcements to concluded and implemented contracts.