Author Archives: Richard Messick

Perceptions of Reality: Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index

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Matthew wrote last month about the February competition the U4 Anticorruption Resource Center and the United Kingdom’s Department for International Affairs sponsored to spur creation of new measures of corruption.  What he did not say is that one subtext for the contest was the growing frustration with the use of Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) to measure the actual level of corruption in a country.

This is not the fault of TI.   The organization is careful to say on its web site that its index does not measure the actual extent of corruption and goes to great lengths to explain how the index is constructed, stressing that it is a ranking of how corrupt countries are perceived to be using the opinions of business people and country experts.  Indeed the title selected, “Corruption Perceptions Index,” couldn’t be any clearer about what is being measured.  But journalists and academics frequently treat the index as if it measured actual corruption, rather than perceived corruption, or assume that perceptions match reality fairly closely.  And that’s where problems may arise. Continue reading →

Bright Line Rules: A Way to Reduce Politicized Enforcement?

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Yesterday Matthew discussed the wisdom of the Thai anticorruption agency’s recommendation that Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra be charged with failing to prevent corruption.  The case would be brought under Article 157 of the Thai Criminal Code, a broadly worded law providing that a public official commits a crime if someone is injured as a result of the official’s failure to exercise his or her duties.

Statutes with such a broad sweep are a standard response to corruption in many countries, enacted out of a fear that a clever criminal can find a way around tightly drawn provisions of law.  Indeed, countries as diverse as Tanzania, South Korea, Indonesia, and Vietnam have all enacted broadly drawn laws that criminalize the “abuse of public office for private gain.”  However, such laws vest enormous discretion in the hands of law enforcement.  A critical–and often overlooked issue–is whether law enforcers should enjoy such discretion. Continue reading →

When Transparency Makes Corruption Worse: Cartels in Public Procurement

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Yesterday Matthew commended the work of Mihály Fazekas, István János Tóth, and their colleagues to those concerned with corruption in public procurement.  I second that recommendation.  In their July 2013, slyly-named “Corruption Manual for Beginners”, the authors describe better than anyone yet how a government buyer can connive to steer a contract to a particular seller — from skewing the contract specifications so that only the favored firm can meet them, to failing to notify others about the procurement, to disqualifying on specious grounds firms that submit bids lower than the favored firm’s bid.

Yet despite the value of the contribution, the authors have not (yet) provided a similarly penetrating analysis of another form of public procurement corruption: that which results not from a conspiracy between a government buyer and one seller but that between the buyer and a group of sellers organized into an industry cartel.  Judging from the results of investigations in settings as different as the American states, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Nepal, France, Columbia, Uganda, Slovakia, and India, this type of corruption maybe be at least as common as the single seller form.  Costly too.  More than half the time, the price a buyer pays in a cartelized market is 25 percent or more higher than what it would have been had there been no collusion among the sellers.

The distinction between these two types of collusion–one involving a single favored seller, the other involving a cartel of sellers–is important, because the appropriate policy response is quite different. When the procurement process is corrupted by a cartel, the standard prescription for combating corruption–transparency–is not only ineffective but self-defeating.  Continue reading →

Personal Financial Disclosure by Chinese Officials: Will China Finally Get Serious?

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Matthew noted yesterday how continuing revelations of the vast wealth some Chinese officials have accumulated put China’s leaders in a bind.  If they don’t curb corruption, they risk undermining their legitimacy; on the other side, so many senior individuals are involved that a serious crackdown could ignite a power struggle.

An important gauge of the direction the leadership will choose is how vigorously it enforces a directive issued in November 2013 requiring public servants to disclose details about their and their family members’ finances.  Requiring senior officials to reveal their personal finances can be a valuable tool in the battle against grand corruption, as one of China’s East Asian neighbors can testify.  In the Philippines, the Statement of Assets, Liabilities, and Net Worth officials must file has been central to exposing the corrupt dealings of a president and a chief justice as well as revealing a nest of corrupt tax collectors. Continue reading →

Bill Gates on Corruption in Development Projects: Is This How He Ran Microsoft? (Part II)

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In an earlier post I showed that Bill Gates’ supposition that only 2 percent of expenditures in development assistance projects were lost to corruption was wildly off the mark.  I also asserted that such lowball estimates are a major hurdle to more effective aid programs: When corruption losses are lowballed, so are the resources devoted to combating corruption.  If losses are 2 percent of the total budget, then it makes little sense to spend 4 percent of the budget trying to prevent them.  But if losses are 20 percent, then 4 percent spent on audits and investigations is a miserly sum.  If losses are closer to 40 percent, then spending 4 percent borders on criminal negligence.

So where did Gates get the 2 percent figure? It turns out that the likely source for that figure illustrates not only how casually influential people sometimes throw around baseless numbers, but also the perverse incentives that development programs sometimes face to downplay the seriousness of corruption in their projects.

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Bill Gates on Corruption in Development Projects: Is This How He Ran Microsoft? (Part I)

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The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has emerged as a major force in the development community – thanks not only to the $28 billion (yes, billion) the Foundation has donated to improve the lives of the world’s poor, but to the license it gives co-chair Bill Gates to speak to development policy. After all, as they used to say of the brokerage firm E.F. Hutton, when a billionaire speaks, people listen — particularly one who gives billions away each year.

Not surprisingly, the letter he and spouse Melinda wrote to serve as the Foundation’s 2014 annual report has been the subject of much attention — excerpted in the Wall Street Journal, quoted in hundreds of press stories and blogs. For the most part, the attention is welcome; the letter nicely puts the lie to several myths that pervade the discussion of poverty and development.  But in a section Microsoft’s founder wrote slaying some common myths about foreign aid, he perpetuates another myth, one that is a major hurdle to more effective aid programs: that corruption in these programs, though undesirable, is relatively minor and manageable. That’s just not true. Continue reading →