Author Archives: Matthew Stephenson

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About Matthew Stephenson

Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

More on Corruption and Growth, and the Importance of Checking Linked Material

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In my post last week, I went after a bunch of recent blog commentary that asserted there wasn’t much evidence that corruption mattered for development (and that also asserted the allegedly disproportionate focus on corruption was a “fetish” of self-satisfied Western countries). My emphasis in that post was on presenting the evidence that corruption is indeed a serious problem, one that citizens in developing countries care about. But I didn’t say much directly in response to the evidence that the targets of my screed (Christopher Blattman, Michael Dowdle, Jason Hickel) had offered for the claim that corruption’s not all it’s cracked up to be as a development problem. Of the posts I went after, Blattman’s made the most effort to ground the corruption’s-not-so-important claim in academic research. So I think his most detailed post on the subject deserves closer scrutiny than I gave it in my original polemic. (By the way, Blattman also included an interesting direct response to my post here; my reply is in his comments section.)

After reviewing Blattman’s post and the research he cites (and links to) in support of his argument that there’s little evidence that corruption matters very much for economic growth, my conclusions are largely unchanged.  Indeed, I think that the academic papers on which Blattman relies tend to undermine his point more than they support it.

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Guest Post: Using FOIA to Get Evidence on Bribe Takers

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Ignacio A. Boulin Victoria, Professor of Public Law at Universidad Nacional de Cuyo (Argentina) and co-founder of the human rights group CLADH, contributes the following guest post, proposing a new legal strategy for acquiring information about bribe-taking public officials:

In a recent post, Richard Messick observed–correctly–that although in the last 10-15 years we have seen greater enforcement by so-called “supply-side” countries against bribe-paying firms, “demand-side” governments have not been willing—or able—to go after the bribe-taking public officials. Rick further observes that once a bribe-paying firm has reached a settlement with a supply-side enforcer (say, the U.S. Department of Justice), it should be much easier for the demand-side government to prosecute the corrupt officials on the other side of the transaction. But we see very little of this. Rick attributes the failure to go after the bribe takers to a combination of factors: lack of capacity on the part of demand-side governments, lack of political will, and lack of information about the settlements with supply-side governments.

Those factors are all important, but Rick overlooks one salient fact about these settlements between bribe-paying firms and supply-side governments: often the public settlement documents do not reveal nearly enough information about the bribe transactions to enable the demand-side governments to take action (unless they undertake substantial and costly additional investigation). In the US, for example, the press release announcing the resolution of a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act matter often looks like this: no names regarding who received the money, no precise time concerning when, no specific department within the agency that received the money. Even if the U.S. government has provided more detailed information about the transactions to demand-side governments, the lack of public disclosure means that if the demand-side government takes no action, local activists lack the ability to use “naming and shaming” techniques effectively.

To go after the bribe-takers effectively–and to put pressure on demand-side governments to do so–we need the names, the dates, and the details of the corrupt transactions.  How do we get them?  I propose a novel (and admittedly aggressive) use of freedom of information laws, like the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Here’s how it would work:

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Is It Unconstitutional To Compel Extractive Industry Firms To Publish What They Pay?

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“Publish What You Pay” (PWYP) is the slogan of the international civil society movement to promote transparency and accountability in the extractive industry sector (oil, gas, minerals, etc.). The idea is to get firms to disclose what they pay to governments, and to get governments to disclose what they receive, in connection with extraction projects. Viewing voluntary programs like the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative as insufficient, the PWYP movement has been pressing for mandatory disclosure requirements. But would such requirements violate the right to free speech protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution?

That question may seem absurd. Requiring truthful disclosures by commercial firms of payments to foreign governments may or may not be an effective anticorruption measure, but is it even plausible that such requirements would violate the constitutional guarantee of free speech? I think the answer should be no. But alas, as is often the case, it’s not clear that my view is shared by the federal judges who are likely to decide this issue. Indeed, there are worrisome signs that the powerful D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals may endorse an absurdly expansive conception of the First Amendment that would block any effective PWYP mandate. Continue reading →

Yes, Corruption Is Bad for Development. No, Corruption Is Not a Western Obsession

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Recently there has been a spate of commentary in the blogosphere that revives a set of tired old canards about corruption and development — the related claims (1) that the focus on corruption and governance in the development discourse is misplaced, because there isn’t a lot of evidence that corruption matters much for development, poverty reduction, etc.; and (2) that anticorruption is a fixation of wealthy, mostly Western countries, because it enables people in those countries congratulate themselves about their moral virtue and to look down on habits and practices in the poor, benighted South. Recent examples include Chris Blattman’s posts on his blog (here, here, and here), Michael Dowdle’s contributions to the Law & Development blog (here and here), and Jason Hickel’s post on Al Jazeera English, though there are others as well.

Sigh. Do we really need to go through this again? OK, look: Yes, there are still lots of unanswered questions about corruption’s causes and consequences, and its significance for various aspects of economic development. And yes, some anticorruption zealots have sometimes over-hyped the role of corruption relative to other factors. But the overwhelming weight of the evidence supports the claim that corruption is a big problem with significant adverse consequences for a range of development outcomes. And the evidence is also quite clear that the focus on corruption as a significant obstacle to development comes as much or more from poor people in poor countries as it does from wealthy Western/Northern elites.

A blog post is not the best format for delving into a very large academic literature on the adverse impacts of corruption. And so the posts to which I’m responding might be forgiven for generally failing to provide much evidence in support of their claims that corruption is relatively unimportant for development, and largely a Western obsession. But, let me at least take a stab at trying to move the conversation beyond unsubstantiated declarations to some assessment of the actual evidence, starting with the impact of corruption on development.

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The Source of the $1 Trillion in Annual Bribes Figure

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In my last post, I discussed my unsuccessful attempts to track down the source for the widely-cited “$1 trillion in annual bribe payments” figure (other than a 2004 World Bank press release, which referenced an unpublished study without further citation).  Several readers were kind enough to direct me to the best published source on the $1 trillion figure: the appendix in a chapter by Daniel Kaufmann in the World Economic Forum’s 2005-2006 Global Competitiveness Report.  The chapter addresses most—though perhaps not all—of my concerns.

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Where Does the “$1 Trillion in Annual Bribes” Number Come From?

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Given the generally accepted view that bribery is widespread around the world, it probably doesn’t make sense to get too hung up over the specific numbers. That said, I’ve seen the figure of (approximately) $1 trillion in annual bribe payments thrown around quite a bit, and I was curious where that number came from.  It seems to me it would be very difficult for even the most intrepid researcher to come up with a plausible ballpark estimate of the total dollar amount of annual bribe transactions. After poking around a bit on the web and in some of the relevant literature, I’m coming up empty. Here’s what I can tell so far: Continue reading →

Objective Validation of Subjective Corruption Perceptions?

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As discussed on this blog and elsewhere, one of the big concerns about the most popular cross-country datasets on corruption (the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), the World Bank Institute’s Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI), etc.) is that they are based (largely or entirely) on perceptions of corruption. As Rick noted in a recent post, and as the critical literature has pointed out ad nauseam, perceptions, while perhaps important in their own right, are not necessarily based in reality. Indeed, some recent research (including, but certainly not limited to, nice papers by Claudio Weber Abramo, by Mireille Razafindrakoto and Francois Rouband, and by Richard Rose and William Mishler) indicates that national corruption perceptions are only weakly correlated with survey results asking about individuals’ personal experience with bribery. This raises serious questions about whether the perception-based indicators are useful either for general assessment or for testing hypotheses about the causes or consequences of corruption.

But might there be more objective measures that could be used to assess whether the corruption perceptions indices are picking up something real? Off the top of my head, I can think of four quite clever recent papers that demonstrate a strong correlation between a subjective corruption perception index and some more objective measure of dishonest behavior. I’m sure there are more, but let me note the four examples that I can think of, and then say a bit on what this might mean for the use of perception-based indicators in empirical corruption research.

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Can Foreign Anti-Bribery Enforcement Statistics Help Us Measure Corruption Levels Objectively?

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We’ve spent a fair amount of time, in the early days of this blog, talking about the challenges of measuring corruption cross-nationally. The well-known perception measures are useful to a point, but suffer from well-known drawbacks, chief among them concerns about how accurately perceptions capture reality. A recent working paper by Laarni Escresa and Lucio Picci, “A New Cross-National Measure of Corruption,” tries to get around these difficulties. Using data on enforcement of foreign anti-bribery laws like the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), Escresa and Picci they derive a new index, which they call the Public Administration Corruption Index (PACI), to make more objective cross-country comparisons in corruption levels. The paper is really clever and creative—but in the end I think it doesn’t work. Let me first say what I think is so cool about the idea, and then explain what I think are the biggest flaws. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Good Governance as a Standalone Development Goal

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Daniel Dudis, Senior Policy Director for Government Accountability at Transparency International USA contributes the following guest post:

The United Nations is currently working towards developing a set of sustainable development goals (SDGs) that will provide the framework for whatever new global commitments are agreed upon as a replacement to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which expire in 2015.  Many development priorities have been identified for potential inclusion among the SDGs–indeed, the most recent document from the U.N. SDG working group lists no fewer than 19 “focus areas” for potential inclusion. As is now widely recognized, the achievement of many of the traditional development goals (poverty eradication, nutrition, education, etc.) requires honest and effective governments. But it is important to go beyond that recognition and make good government–government that is both effective and free of corruption–a development goal in and of itself. In considering which development priorities to enshrine for inclusion among the future SDGs, UN member states should insist on the inclusion of “good governance” as a specific, standalone governance goal.

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McCutcheon v. FEC Is a Substantive Clash, Not a Definitional One

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The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last week in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission – which struck down limits on the aggregate amount any one individual could contribute to multiple candidates during a single electoral cycle – has attracted a great deal of attention.  Indeed, it has already generated so much discussion that I’m not sure I have much to add (particularly given that I’m not a campaign finance expert). But one piece of commentary on the decision caught my eye: on the Wall Street Journal’s blog, Jacob Gershman argues that McCutcheon is not just about the clash over the value of political speech and the effect of money on political integrity, but “at a more basic level” the decision is about “how to define the concept of ‘corruption.’”  Many of my colleagues in the legal academy – several of whom are quoted in Mr. Gershman’s post – agree with that assessment, as does Justice Breyer in his dissenting opinion in McCutcheon.  But I don’t think it’s quite right—or at least it’s only partly right.

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