One of the big challenges in anticorruption work, which I suspect we will be discussing quite a bit on this blog, concerns the measurement of corruption. After all, there are a bunch of different theories about the causes and consequences of corruption, and about the best way to combat it. Testing these theories requires some way of measuring the extent of corruption (or different forms of the corruption problem). And for folks actually doing anticorruption work (donors, governments, NGOs, etc.), it would be nice to be able to assess how well programs are working. Yet all of the existing measures have significant problems.

To try to inspire some creative thinking about new ways to measure corruption, the good people at the U4 Anti-Corruption Resources Centre (affiliated with the Christian Michelsen Institute in Bergen, Norway), with the assistance of the UK’S Department for International Development (DFID), recently sponsored a competition (the “Proxy Challenge”) to come up with new proxies that would help track the progress of anticorruption reform initiatives. U4 hosted a one-day workshop last month to let the five finalists present their proxies, to choose a winner, and to promote some general discussion of the challenges of developing useful proxies for corruption in a variety of contexts. I was able to attend. I’ll try to post a some more substantive thoughts in a later post, but here are a few quick reactions. Continue reading →