Author Archives: Richard Messick

At Last, A Good News Corruption Story

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It seems that not a day goes by without some gloomy story about corruption appearing in the popular media or online. “Corruption on the rise in Africa poll as governments seen failing to stop it” says a new TI study.  “In Mexico, 200 million acts of corruption a year” the Mexican Competitiveness Institute reports.  Monday’s Washington Post editorial proclaims that “Mali’s corruption hindered its efforts to fight terror,” and the subtitle of a best-selling book warns that it is not only Malians who are at risk but that corruption “Threatens Global Security as Well.”

With all this bad news it was a surprise to discover a recent good news story about corruption.  The news is doubly surprising as it comes out of three unexpected places: Ghana Kenya, and Uganda.  Even better, rather than broad generalizations drawn from a handful of selected anecdotes, the good news in Professors Rebecca Dizon-Ross, Pascaline Dupas, and Jonathan Robinson’s July 2015 “Governance and the Effectiveness of Public Health Subsidies” paper rests on a careful, clever empirical study that employs rigorous scientific methods.  The only bad news about the paper is that it is on a remote internet site beyond the ken of most web browsers.  For readers whose browsers don’t travel to the National Bureau of Economic Research’s web site, a potted summary follows. Continue reading →

The Challenge of Police Reform in Developing Nations

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A new volume from CRC press, Police Corruption and Police Reforms in Developing Societies, provides an informative if frustrating look at efforts to combat corruption in the police services of developing countries.  Informative for two reasons: one, because editor Kempe Ronald Hope marshals such powerful evidence in his introduction for the primacy of tackling corruption in the police.  Two, because the authors he has assembled offer such authoritative, in-depth studies of how police corruption has been attacked in eight developing states spread across Africa, the Asia-Pacific region, and Latin America and the Caribbean plus Hong Kong.  Policymakers in developing states no longer have any excuse for not prioritizing police anticorruption reforms.  Nor can they plead ignorance of the ingredients required.

But a list of ingredients does not itself make a stew.  That takes a recipe for how to combine the ingredients: in what proportions and when.  And that is one reason why the volume is so frustrating. It lacks a recipe for police reform. Continue reading →

An Inside Perspective on the Replacement of the Head of Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission

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As many readers will know, on Monday, November 9, Ibrahim Lamorde stepped down as head of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, the country’s principal anti-corruption agency.  Although initial reports say Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari fired him, Presidential spokesperson Femi Adesina denies this was the case. Adesina explained that the President had decided not to re-appoint Lamorde, a career member of the Nigerian police force, to a second term when his current one expires this February and that his leaving the EFCC now is in accordance with procedures governing the rotation of career government employees.

Controversy over the tenure of the EFCC is nothing new.  The “reassignment” of its first chief, Nuhu Ribadu, for the flimsiest of reasons was a response by Nigeria’s corrupt class to a far too aggressive investigator.  Rumors why Lamorde is leaving point in the opposite direction, the claim being he was let go because he had been going too easy on the gaggle of corrupt businesses and politicians stealing so much of the national patrimony.

GAB asked a close observer of Nigerian politics for his take.  He writes: Continue reading →

The Case of the Disappearing Transparency Report

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Last week a colleague sent a link to a report assessing Norway’s compliance with its promises to the Open Government Partnership to increase government transparency.  Surprisingly, given the Norwegian government is considered one of the more open and transparent on the planet, the authors gave the government low marks. What’s even more surprising is their candor in assessing the transparency movement in Norway. They suggest that transparency has become an end in itself.

My fear is that this is a trend not confined to Norway.  Rather than pursuing transparency as a means to a more accountable, less corrupt government, the Norwegian case illustrates what has become all too common among transparency advocates: they have come to believe that transparency is an end in itself — to be pursued no matter the consequences.

Shortly after the report appeared on the website of the NGO Engine Room, its institutional author, it disappeared — which may mean I am not the only one who found the report quite damning.  In any event, while I didn’t download the entire report before it was taken down, I did copy an excerpt from the abstract showing my fear is not fanciful: Continue reading →

Building Corruption Concerns into Land Registration Systems: A Lesson from Cambodia

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The low cost exchange of property is critical for economic growth, assuring that resources flow to those who can put them to their highest use.  But where property rights are insecure, where buyers can’t be sure that they will get an uncontested claim to what they purchase, that easy exchange will not occur.  Hence over the past two decades the World Bank, regional development banks, and many bilateral aid agencies have invested significant resources in helping developing nations strengthen the laws and institutions that secure property rights.  The largest investments have been in titling and registering land.  Land is the principle asset of most citizens in both developed and developing states, and although residents of wealthy countries take it for granted when buying a home that the property registry is accurate and the seller’s documents valid, this is a luxury most citizens in the developing world are denied.

But while building a land titling and registration system in a developing country is an important step in boosting growth and improving citizen well-being, it is time-consuming, costly and can go wrong in many ways.  In a 2014 article in the Asian Journal of Law and Society (earlier version here), New York University’s Leah Trzcinski and Frank Upham show how the failure to consider the vulnerability of the system to corruption derailed a Cambodian project and how greater attention to local context, in particular the high degree of corruption present in many Cambodian institutions, could have made for a far more successful project.   Continue reading →

Money in Politics: Can’t Experience Teach Us Anything?

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My complaint in last week’s post that Checkbook Elections, the recent study of campaign and party finance rules in 11 countries, failed to offer any guidance for reformers drew a sharp and quick retort from University of Sussex researcher Samuel Power.  Power says I didn’t like the study because it didn’t produce a “one-size fits all” solution to the problem of controlling money in politics.  That search for the holy grail of campaign and party finance is misguided, he says, for reforms are context specific.  When a reformer, Power writes, asks a money-in-politics guru “. . . for ‘guidance on what works,’ the (sensible) answer is very likely to be ‘well it depends. . . .’”

But depends on what Mr. Power?  Climate?  Latitude?  Ethnolinguistic  fractionalization?   Continue reading →

Money in Politics: Can it be Controlled?

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The research consortium Money, Politics, and Transparency recently released Checkbook Elections, a summary of a two year, multi-million dollar project to examine the role of money in politics.  A principal aim of the study was to identify “what works, what fails, and why” when countries reform laws governing campaign and party finance.  To answers to these questions, researchers analyzed how and why governments regulate the financing of political campaigns and political parties, drawing on case studies of regulation in Brazil, Britain, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, and the United States.

Checkbook Elections‘ authors tout the results, asserting the volume provides “several core findings” which offer “important lessons for policy makers both domestically and internationally wishing to support countries in their reform trajectories.” Unfortunately for those looking for ideas on what kinds of campaign and party finance reforms might help control corruption, this is hype.  The text offers but a few lessons.  None are new or terribly important or generalizable.  The study, however, does contain an important conclusion, one which the authors are candid enough to report even if they don’t feature it. Continue reading →

Why Hasn’t the Indian Parliament Plugged the Gaping Hole in the Nation’s Anticorruption Law?

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India’s leaders have taken numerous steps in recent years to curb the pervasive corruption that grips the country.  Right to information, whistleblower protection, and other preventive measures have been enacted; an anticorruption agency was created in 2013, and this past April the Cabinet recommended the legislature amend the anticorruption laws to stiffen the penalties for bribery.  But despite the enormous attention the drive to combat corruption has garnered, a September 2015 Supreme Court opinion again pointed to a gaping a hole in the Prevention of Corruption Act 1988, the nation’s basic anticorruption law, a hole that is easily repairable but that, until it is, makes convicting bribe-taking public servants far harder than it should be.

Why lawmakers have yet to seal the hole is a mystery. They have known about it since 2011, when the Supreme Court first exposed it.  It is an easy one to close, and until it is closed who knows how many civil servants will demand bribes with near impunity? Continue reading →

Sustainable Development Goal 16: Am I the Only One Who Thinks It Is a Major Setback in the Fight Against Corruption?

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Last week Matthew asked if he were the only one who wasn’t excited about Sustainable Development Goal 16.   At first glance it is hard to understand why he would ask such a question.  One of 17 goals approved September 25 by the United Nations General Assembly to end poverty by 2030, SDG 16 establishes an ambitious agenda for improving the way the nations of the world govern their citizens by, among other measures, requiring concerted global action to “substantially reduce corruption and bribery in all their forms.”  How could anyone, particularly one who works on corruption issues, not be ecstatic that the 193 member-states of the United Nations unanimously endorsed this objective? And indeed numerous anticorruption advocates have already celebrated its approval (click here for Transparency International’s enthusiastic endorsement).

Although the opening of Matthew’s post was low-key (am I the only one not excited?), readers quickly learned that he was in fact severely critical of SDG 16’s corruption and bribery target because of the way progress towards realizing it is to be measured: by changes in a nation’s score on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.  Matthew nicely summarized why this is insane on technical grounds.  Here I explain why using the CPI to measure progress is not only insane but represents a major setback in the fight against corruption. Continue reading →

Will the Canadian Courts Wreck International Law Enforcement Cooperation on Corruption Cases?

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The answer to the question posed in the title depends upon how the Canadian Supreme Court rules in World Bank Group v. Kevin Wallace.  If the court rules that, despite laws providing it is not subject to the orders of domestic courts, the World Bank must obey a directive of the Ontario Superior Court, cooperation between the Bank and national law enforcement agencies is likely to end – or be severely weakened at the least.  The pleadings filed in the case, and just made available on the Supreme Court’s web site, describe how the court is poised to weaken transnational efforts to curb corruption. In summary . . . Continue reading →