Although nobody has ever argued that transparency is a panacea for corruption, the international anti-corruption movement has long invested in transparency with the goal to deter corruption. Seeing the explosive development of transparency in many forms one would expect that control of corruption improves. Still, as discussed at length in this working paper of ours, control of corruption lags with nearly no significant progress since the advances made by Georgia, South Korea, or Costa Rica nearly two decades ago. So which one is it? Transparency is not enough or there is not enough transparency to deter corruption?

An answer to these questions has been seriously hindered so far by lack of data. We do not have a measurement of transparency, although various types of it do get measured (e.g. fiscal transparency). We do have some proxies and indirect measurements for corruption. Now presuming we can measure both at the national level we can start having some answers.