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Corruption and Development
(2023)
Rethinking Corruption
(2023)
Political Science
(2023)
Presenting the broad spectrum of interdisciplinary academic research on corruption, this essential reference book examines anti-corruption legislation, governance mechanisms, international instruments, and other preventative measures intended to tackle corruption. Including over 100 entries and adopting a comprehensive approach to researching and combating corruption, this Encyclopedia covers the key ideas, concepts, and theories in corruption law.
Despite the salience of transparency in policy and democracy debates a global measurement of transparency has always been missing. In its absence, measuring the impact of transparency on accountability and corruption for a large number of countries has been difficult, with scholars using more or less adequate proxies. This paper introduces a new measurement of real transparency—the T-index—using 14 de facto components, based on direct observations of official websites in 129 countries and five de jure components, based on the transparency laws and conventions adopted. The resulting index is a measurement with very good internal and external validity and moderate precision. The paper argues that de facto transparency must be considered alongside de jure (legal) transparency if we are to judge the impact (or lack of) transparency against accountability and corruption, as a large implementation gap exists, in particular in poor countries, between legal commitments and real transparency. The T-index has significant impact on both perception and objective indicators of corruption, including perceived change in corruption over time as measured by the Global Corruption Barometer. An analysis of outliers shows that high transparency alone is not sufficient to achieve control of corruption, especially in countries with low human development and poor rule of law, although transparency is a robust predictor of corruption with GDP controls. The data with all sources is available for download as T-index 2022 dataset: DOI 10.5281/zenodo.7225627 and an interactive webpage developed for updates is available at www.corruptionrisk.org/transparency.
The Western Balkans EU candidate countries face rule of law challenges far more serious than Hungary or Poland did at the time of their accessions in 2004. Despite extensive EU conditionality and support, with 16% of EU pre-structural funds dedicated between 2014 and 2020 to rule of law projects, governance indicators show no substantial change. The European Court of Auditors (ECA) also found little impact in advancing the rule of law in the candidate countries in the Western Balkans. The European Commission, however, does report signs of progress. By drawing on public procurement data from the two sectors concentrating most public expenditure, namely health and construction, between the years 2017 and 2019, this paper solves the dilemma of how allegedly successful reforms can happen without much impact. By directly measuring government favouritism in procurement, before and after EU-driven reforms, the paper finds that evolution has so far been limited despite proving the effect of certain interventions. The paradox is explained by providing evidence of versatile behaviour by the main rent owners and the increasing discretionary power of Albania’s governing party.
While the process of digitalization offers new opportunities, politics gets in the way of the already notoriously difficult to measure rule of law. This paper briefly presents the challenges to rule of law measurement and argues that sound measurement is possible only if the measure is narrowed down, or its components are separately examined. It then offers two innovations of such separate measurements on transparency and national integrity at national level developed by the European Research Center for Anticorruption and State-building (ERCAS) in Berlin. Finally, the paper argues that the governance context greatly impacts the quality of data used in public policy evaluation and should be used as controls. For instance, higher transparency predicts higher COVID 19 fatality rates at national level with all relevant controls, while higher corruption predicts more excess deaths, using the new indicators. This shows that the data on COVID 19 fatalities outside the democratic developed countries is likely to be seriously flawed and that it is worth investing in facts and not perceptions when measuring governance. The working paper pleads for the use of directly observable digital tools to move to a generation of more transparent and specific governance indicators, able to provide the evidence needed in public policy evaluation.
This chapter argues that the adoption of the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC) in 2004 and its subsequent ratification by more than 180 parties indicates universal agreement on the norms of quality of government, putting an end to moral relativist arguments. While UNCAC does not define corruption, it defines good governance and sets ethical universalism as its key benchmark. The chapter then follows the intellectual history of this concept and its remarkable success, with the norm of equal, fair, and nondiscriminatory treatment of every citizen present in every current constitutional contract. Ratification does not necessarily mean implementation when corruption is concerned, and the chapter surveys limitations to the practice of ethical universalism in governance and existing approaches to narrow the gap between norm and practice.
Keywords: corruption, quality of government, equality of opportunity, ethical universalism, good governance