Author Archives: Richard Messick

Fighting Corruption:  Lessons from Eastern Europe and Central Asia

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Over the last few years a number of studies have appeared analyzing the lessons learned from the first decade of anticorruption policies.  The most recent is  Why Corruption Matters: Understanding Causes, Effects and How to Address Them reviewed March 18 on this blog.  Others are: the U4 Anticorruption Resource Center’s Mapping Evidence Gaps in Anticorruption; Kennedy School Professor Rema Hanna and colleagues’ The Effectiveness of Anticorruption Policy: What has Worked, What Hasn’t, and What We Know; The Norwegian Aid Agency’s Joint Evaluation of Support to Anticorruption Efforts, 2002 – 2009; Contextual Choices in Fighting Corruption: Lessons Learned by Hertie School Professor Alina Mungiu-Pipidi and associates; the report by GRECO, or the Group of States against Corruption, Lessons Learnt from the Three Evaluation Rounds (2000 – 2010): Thematic Articles; and the analysis by the World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group, A Review of World Bank Support for Accountability Institutions in the Context of Governance and Anticorruption. While each merits study, I thought it useful to highlight some of the important findings of each in a series of posts over the coming weeks.

Today’s entry summarizes a valuable contribution to this “lessons learned” literature by the Anticorruption Network for Eastern Europe and Central Asia, a regional outreach program of the OECD’s Working Group on Bribery whose members include the nations of Eastern Europe and Central Asia and OECD member states.  As part of the network’s activities eight countries – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan – volunteered to have their anticorruption policies judged by their peers against the standards in the United Nations Convention Against Corruption, other international conventions, and international best practice.  Anticorruption Reforms in Eastern Europe and Central Asia: Progress and Challenges, 2009 -2013 sums up the lessons from the latest round of review of these eight countries efforts to combat corruption. Continue reading →

Is Going Local the Answer? OxFam America’s New Report: “To Fight Corruption, Localize Aid”

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In a new report on U.S. foreign assistance, To Fight Corruption, Localize Aid, OxFam America urges radical changes in the way the United States helps developing nations combat corruption.  Providing funds to strengthen anticorruption agencies, write new laws, and other traditional “top-down, donor-driven methods of fighting corruption” have had little impact on corruption the American member of the international Oxfam confederation asserts.  U.S. aid should thus be redirected to “locally driven approaches” to fighting corruption.  By this the report means U.S. assistance would go directly to “local change agents” so that they could “tackle institutional challenges, including corruption, in their towns, cities, and countries.”

The rhetoric of a community-based, “bottom up” approach to fighting corruption has an appealing ring, and the report showcases successful efforts to combat corruption at the local level in Guatemala, Liberia, and the Philippines to support its claims.  But a closer reading of these stories, and of the report itself, shows that the rhetoric outstrips the reality.

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New DfID Report: Few Donor-Supported Anticorruption Policies Effective

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The United Kingdom’s Department for International Development released a new report February 25 summarizing the learning on corruption in developing nations and how to combat it.  Why Corruption Matters: Understanding Causes, Effects and How to Address Them was commissioned to help donor agency staff who advise on anticorruption policies and to assist in the design of programs to control corruption.  As its title advertises, the report examines three issues: the causes of corruption; its costs, both financial and non-financial; and what measures reduce it.  Those searching for what developing nations can do to fight corruption will turn immediately to chapter 5, “Anticorruption Measures,” which evaluates a variety of different efforts to control corruption from ratifying UNCAC to reforming customs and tax agencies to conducting public expenditure tracking surveys.

Readers looking for new steps developing countries can take to control corruption or confirmation that the standard approaches are working will be disappointed.  Few interventions have had any effect, and with one exception, the evidence showing these have had an impact is thin.

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A Mexican Candidate’s Income and Asset Declaration Lambasted as “Amazing,” “Absurd,” “Inconsistent”   

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Under pressure from civil society, Mexican officials are starting to come clean about their personal finances, but as Marcelo Ebrard, a candidate in this June’s parliamentary elections, has learned, a half-baked disclosure of one’s financial life can backfire.  His disclosure drew nothing but scorn from the experts the on-line journal Sinembargo had review it. They found it implausible that a senior member of the Mexican political establishment claimed to own no house and to earn less than 150,000 pesos (~ $9,600) a month after leaving high office.  They questioned why money he received from his political party was not disclosed, contracts that might create conflict of interest were he elected not revealed, and his wife’s assets not reported.  What he released did not meet international standards for financial disclosure, and the disclosure, they bemoaned, was thus a “lost opportunity” to establish a new benchmark for transparency by political candidates.

While these criticisms may harm Ebrard’s chances of being elected to Mexico’s lower house of parliament, that he had to release a financial statement and that civil society invested the time and effort to examine it are both encouraging signs that Mexico’s anticorruption movement is taking off. Continue reading →

Are We Underestimating the Extent of Bribery in the World?

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The astounding figure Richard Rose and Caryn Peiffer report in their new book, Paying Bribes for Public Services, that almost one quarter of world’s population or 1.6 billion people, recently paid a bribe would suggest the answer to the question above is a resounding “No.”  The 1.6 billion figure sounds so fantastically large that the suspicion arises that it is one of those gauzy numbers conjured up using shaky assumptions and questionable sources to capture headlines rather than advance learning.  Yet recent research by the World Bank’ Art Kraay and University of Maryland Professor Peter Murrell shows that, if anything, the Rose and Peiffer 1.6 billion number is low.

Their figure is based on the most solid of evidence: interviews by phone or in-person where respondents are asked whether they had to pay a bribe to obtain a public service.  Transparency International’s 2013 Global Corruption Barometer, a main source for the 1.6 billion number, is an example.  Surveyors first ask respondents if they or anyone else in their household has had any contact in the past 12 months with anyone associated with any of eight government services: i) the education system, ii) the judiciary, iii) medical or health services, iv) the police, v) registry and permit services, vi) utilities, vii) tax collection or, viii) land service.  If the answer is yes, the surveyor then asks:

In your contact or contacts have you or anyone living in your household paid a bribe in any form in the past 12 months?    

What could be a more reliable way to gather evidence of bribery?  Instead of asking what people think about bribery or what their perceptions of bribery or corruption are, they are asked about their own personal experience, or that of close relatives, with the crime of bribery.  The rub comes with the last phrase in the preceding sentence: the respondent is being questioned about “the crime of bribery.”

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Anticorruption Policymaking: The Critical Role of Information

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“. . . [S]ound policies require good information – about the existence, nature, and causes of a problem, about the costs and benefits to the affected public of various possible solutions to the problem, and about the effectiveness of current policies.” Peter H. Schuck, Why Government Fails So Often: And How it Can Do Better. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014, p. 162.

Few axioms of policymaking would seem as self-evident as the one above, and few are so often observed in the breach.  Developing the knowledge required for good policymaking can be expensive, time-consuming, and intellectually challenging.  At the same time, policymakers are often under pressure to act; the problem is urgent; the public demands a solution, and they want to address the nation’s ills, or at least appear to address them, quickly.  So policy is made on the basis of incomplete data, hunches, intuition, and plain guesswork. The unfortunate result, as the title of Schuck’s book advertises, is almost always a policy failure.

Anticorruption is an area that seems particularly prone to policymaking on the fly.  In 2007 the U4 Anticorruption Resource Centre examined different countries experiences developing and implementing a national anticorruption strategy.  A major finding: “information, knowledge, and understanding of corruption continue to be a great weakness for the formulation and prioritization of anticorruption initiatives . . . .”  A more recent review of national anticorruption strategies Matthew and I have underway for the UNODC suggests matters have changed little in the intervening years. Countries as different as India, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Thailand have constructed detailed, complex strategies for combating corruption on a thin to non-existent knowledge base.

Given the challenges of building a sound knowledge base for anticorruption policymaking, it is easy to understand why this critical step in the process is so often ignored. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Zambia’s Director of Public Prosecutions Describes Efforts to Unconstitutionally Remove Him for Prosecuting former President

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Below is a February 16 letter Mutembo Nchito, Zambia’s Director of Public Prosecutions, wrote to fellow prosecutors recounting recent efforts to have him removed from office. Links have been added to some of the references cited.

Dear Colleagues,

I trust you are well. I have had an eventful 10 or so days that I feel duty bound to share with you.

As some of you may know Zambia lost its fifth President October 28, 2014. This is the President that requested me to join the public service as Director of Public Prosecutions. My mandate was to transform the Ministry of Justice’s Department of Public Prosecutions into an autonomous National Prosecution Authority. This I embarked on with a reasonable measure of success.

That said one of the main reasons I was hired was my history of anticorruption prosecution. Since 2002 I have prosecuted many cases of high profile corruption that have seen me indict two former presidents, a chief of intelligence,  a Zambia Army Commander, a Zambia Air Force commander and a commander of another defence force called the Zambia National Service. I also prosecuted a former Minister of Finance and his permanent secretaries for corruption and abuse of office among many other high profile individuals.

Except for the first president who was acquitted in very controversial circumstances most, if not all the cases I prosecuted, resulted in convictions. As you can imagine this has earned me very powerful enemies. Continue reading →

A Workable Conflict of Interest Law

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My January 28 post on conflict of interest complained that the laws of many countries were unduly vague making it next to impossible for officeholders to know what constitutes an unlawful conflict of interest.  Matthew noted in his comment that lawmakers commonly face a dilemma in such situations.  They can either write a rule that clearly specifies what is prohibited, but which can then be easily circumvented, or draft a broadly drawn standard that covers a wider range of conduct but at the cost of vagueness.  (Click here for more on the rules versus standards dilemma.)

Matthew asked how legislators can resolve the tension between these two conflicting objectives. I recommend that the law distinguish between two types of conflict of interest.

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Banning the Appearance of a Conflict of Interest: Another Misguided Ethics Rule

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Last week I wrote about the problems arising from laws which make “conflicts of interest” illegal but which do not define “interest.”  As I explained, the harm that results from leaving “interest” undefined, or vaguely defined, is of several kinds:  Public employees have no way to know when they should avoid making or participating in a decision; authorities can easily slant enforcement of the law to serve their own ends; and the ease with which charges of conflict of interest can be leveled in the court of public opinion undermines public confidence by creating the impression that conflicts of interest are ubiquitous.

Making “the appearance of a conflict of interest” illegal can do as much, if not more, harm. Continue reading →

What’s the Interest in “Conflict of Interest”?

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“Conflict of interest” is a deceptively simple term devilishly difficult to apply.  It first came into common parlance in the United States in the nineteen fifties thanks to the political uproar sparked when the former CEO of General Motors Charles Wilson, President Eisenhower’s nominee to be the Secretary of Defense, told the Senate that the interests of the U.S. and General Motors were aligned.  Senators questioned that premise given that Mr. Wilson owned considerable GM stock and as Secretary of Defense would make decisions that would affect that stock.  His interest in seeing the value of his stock holdings rise would, they asserted, conflict with his duty to advance the national interest and so they demanded he sell the stock to avoid any conflict of interest.

The ensuing controversy about when a public official must sell off assets or take other measures to prevent a conflict of interest prompted Congress to update and modernize federal ethics laws.  A 1962 statute banned four types of conflicts, those arising from employees: i) awarding themselves government contracts, ii) assisting anyone in pursuing a claim against the government, iii) taking money from someone for discharging their duties as a government employee, or iv) advising, after leaving government employee, an individual or firm on a matter they worked while an employee.

Each of these four involves the possibility that the employee will put his or her personal, financial interest ahead of the public interest when taking a decision.  These are clear, “bright line” rules easy to understand and easy to enforce.  The problem has come with the subsequent expansion of the term “interest.”

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