Articles – ERCAS

Upholding Integrity: The causes and trends of corruption risk in Europe-41.

A varied landscape in corruption risk ALINA MUNGIU-PIPPIDI AND IVA PARVANOVA (LUISS) The report assessed the public integrity framework and corruption risk for 41 European countries, European Union (EU), candidate countries (CCEU) and non-aligned countries (EUN- Norway, Iceland, Switzerland, UK). It finds that the ability of EU Member States in the North-West to control corruption […]

What’s wrong with the term ‘strategic corruption’?

Buying people in the opposite camp to switch allegiance is an activity as old as states are. In antiquity, bribes were often given to shift the loyalty of allies from one camp to another. The Byzantines famously bribed the Turks to fight as mercenaries in their internal wars, thus giving them a way in, and […]

Follow the Money

We are excited to announce that the search engine for investigating suspicious oligarchs, politicians, or companies FOLLOW THE MONEY now works on the BridgeGap website. Follow the Money is a search engine enabled by the Youcontrol, a #BridgeGap partner organization, on top of their YC World pooled database. The search engine enables investigating beneficial ownership […]

Preserving the integrity of corruption measurement

You may say it’s a joke, but it’s not. Why, in recent years, do we have such a congestion of corruption measurements, especially among international organizations? For many years, only the World Bank and Transparency International did that and led the field by similar, limited but transparent methods: aggregating all expert scores or organizing public […]

What do corruption perception indexes tell us?

As it does every year, the release of the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) from Transparency International is making headlines. And rightly so. There is no better occasion for the political opposition and the critical media to rally against the government—that is, in countries blessed to enjoy a free press and a political opposition, which are […]

How will corruption evolve in 2024?

Every year on December 9 the world celebrates International Anticorruption Day. This is the annual moment to review the state of global corruption, as well as the best opportunity to reflect on the poverty of our review tools. It has always been a challenge to measure corruption, but to measure corruption across time is the ultimate challenge. Another year of struggle against corruption is coming to a pass. Are we nearer to the target? Has any country graduated to good governance, in the ‘green’ area of the upper third of the global ranking? Has any country already in that area experienced some backsliding? Are some countries closer to reaping the benefits of many years of reforms or, on the contrary, does the world risk losing more countries to state capture?

Transparency in the Time of War – a Survey for 143 countries

The new 2023 report covers 143 countries and a very different world from the pilot project we ran in 2021, as global trends of democracy backsliding and violence have become all too visible. And still, the public good of transparency is still there and citizens still need to hold their governments accountable even during wartime. Removing countries engaged in war from the T-index would be an artificial way to show the world better than it is: we do not aim for that and although we considered this option, we eliminated it in the end. As war, in one form or another, has become a part of the lives of more countries than the ones directly engaged in it in 2023, we will also show the performance of countries under war in this report, with the clear understanding that causes might be beyond their control. Beyond the loss of life and infrastructure, war destroys transparency built by many governments, sometimes even generations, and its consequences need to be seen as well.

For a clean and sustainable reconstruction of Ukraine

We need to collect needs based on multiple sources, involve civil society from planning to audit, set targets for both the public procurement process and outcomes and tie them to the performance evaluation of a newly trained generation of public managers in charge of allocating and managing reconstruction funds. Nothing creates more opportunities for corruption than war. But a war where foreign money pours in is bound to multiply exponentially such opportunities, especially in an already enabling environment. This short text presents five clear issues that the reconstruction has to grapple with and indicates the type of solutions. This is not a detailed report, but simply a statement of principles needed for a sound reconstruction.

Counting the Dead Transparently

The new transparency index (T-index) shows that the official pandemic fatality figure is deeply flawed in many countries, starting with Russia Once a war starts, propaganda becomes a chief weapon, so it is impossible to know the number of casualties from only one source. But even before the Russian-Ukrainian war, in the fight against the […]

New 2021 IPI data shows Moldova and Argentina among the few achievers

2021 was a banal year in terms of developments, far from the landmark year for anti-corruption expected by some (civil society should know by now that it’s not international summits which change countries, be they UN or whatever, as the magic revolutions from outside just do not work). But it was not a banal year in terms of corruption indicators. The exposure of pressures on the otherwise very useful and influential Doing Business of the World Bank opened the door to the shadow reality of gaming and pressuring around governance indicators, which does not affect the World Bank alone (at least, judging by the performance on Judicial Independence in the World Economic Forum survey of the same problematic countries). But as the saying goes, what does not kill you makes you stronger...

The Doing Business Gate: Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater

It’s been quite a few years now that I have been teaching hundreds of students on the limitations of governance indicators, especially the ‘big data’ ones. As someone who was educated first as a scientist and only later as a social scientist, I have never quite felt comfortable with data that I did not collect […]

European public accountability trends now updated!

The European Union is the absolute achiever on standards and benchmarks. Thousands exist and are strictly guarded by various enforcement agencies: some inspired anecdotes and were furiously disputed over the Brexit divorce. Less spoken about are EU standards on public accountability, despite having now a Rule of Law (ROL) Report on the member states and monitoring processes for accession countries. There is a very simple reason for this: they do not exist as such. While we uphold a Europe of rule of law and free of corruption as ideals for member states and aspiring countries, we do not actually have a standard way of achieving those, or clear European benchmarks. Finland and Denmark are quite unregulated on public accountability but extraordinarily transparent, and they lead in all good governance charts. Hungary and Poland have been backsliding on both rule of law and democracy but their legal arrangements are quite thick. In some areas, at least.

Real versus Legal: A Tale of Two Transparencies

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.

EU Rule of Law Report Captive on its Tracks

The European Commission is already planning a second rule of law report, although the first brought no further evidence to the already known problems of Hungary or Poland, and only showed the weakness of conceptualization and methodology at this stage. The German presidency made the concession to Hungary and Poland that Courts will have the first say in the event of a sanction. While critics were fast to denounce Merkel to have yielded to the populists, the most elementary legal common sense shows that Courts would have anyway got involved. Is it not better, then, to have them involved sooner rather than later? If we want to cut EU funds, we need to use the public procurement policy and its very good monitoring by another part of the Commission (in the EU Single Market PP Scoreboard). Member states who do not reach targets there are the same who infringe on rule of law: Hungary, Poland, Romania, Malta, Czech Republic.