Category Archives: Commentary

Civil Society Organizations Can Help Fight Corruption in the COVID-19 Response. But Only if Governments Let Them

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Corruption in the health sector—a longstanding problem that may cost $500 billion per year globally—has become an even more salient concern in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the virus swept the globe, many governments responded by sidestepping traditional procurement safeguards in the interest of speeding up emergency responses. While it was important to provide relief as quickly as possible, the relaxed regulations allowed corruption to thrive, leading to numerous scandals. To illustrate with just a few of the many, many possible examples: Bolivia’s Minister of Health was detained for allegedly purchasing 179 unusable ventilators at twice their original price; Indonesia’s Minister for Social Affairs was suspected of having pocketed US$1.1 million in funds relating to COVID-19 aid; and senior leaders and wealthy individuals in numerous countries, including Canada, Peru, Argentina, Spain, and Poland, jumped the queue to get access to vaccines. Much of this health sector corruption arises due to a lack of transparency and accountability in the governing systems. Especially in the midst of what seems like a never-ending pandemic, working towards combatting this type of corruption is especially salient as citizens are relying on the government for more health-related needs.

Anticorruption advocates have long argued that civil society organizations (CSOs) can and should play an important role in monitoring government activities and promoting accountability in the health context and elsewhere. A particularly encouraging example of the constructive role that CSOs can play, in the specific context of the COVID-19 response, comes from Argentina. Last year, the Argentine chapter of Transparency International, known as Poder Ciudadano, launched a COVID-19 Public Procurement Observatory, which uses open-source information to make procurement deals available to the public. Using this monitoring tool, Poder Ciudadano carried out an exhaustive survey of public purchases and contracting that took place within the COVID-19 emergency procurement framework. By December 2020, Poder Ciudadano had tracked more than seven hundred procurement activities valued at US$200 million. In addition to its work in monitoring COVID-related procurement, Poder Ciudadano worked with other CSOs to ensure transparency and equity in vaccine distribution. Using information provided by the Ministry of Health, these CSOs ensured daily publication of information about the numbers of vaccine shipments, their distribution, and who had been vaccinated. These transparency measures help prevent improper favoritism and other departures from the official vaccine distribution plan.

This example is both encouraging and instructive. The Poder Ciudadano case highlights how CSOs can be effective in promoting accountability and transparency in procurement and distribution. But this example also underscores that in order to play this role, CSOs in developing countries need outside funding, partnerships, and resources, as well as the support and cooperation of their governments. CSOs can play a vital role, but only if they have the right kind of help.

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Making Release of the CPI into Something Useful in the Fight Against Corruption

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Yesterday’s release of the Corruption Perceptions Index prompted the annual, dreary, unproductive pattern of overblown press releases and gnashing of teeth. Critics cite their government’s failure to sharply increase its CPI score as an excuse for issuing press releases bashing it for failings of every kind. The teeth gnashing comes from those in governments doing their best to fight corruption and frustrated that their efforts have had no discernable impact on the score.

No part of my work helping countries curb corruption has been more frustrating than trying to explain to the media, dedicated government corruption fighters, and civil society that they should stop making such a fuss about yearly changes in CPI scores. As Matthew reiterated in yesterday’s post (for the umpteenth time), short-term comparisons are “a pointless, misleading, intellectually bankrupt exercise.” But my explanations, GAB posts, and the academic literature explaining in excruciating detail why it takes years if not decades for anticorruption reforms to affect a nation’s CPI score have all fallen on deaf ears.

Thankfully, government corruption fighters and their supporters in Nigeria have found a way to use release of the CPI to advance the fight against corruption.  As explained here, last year its Minister of Information and Culture responded to the release of the CPI with a statement describing what the government had done over the past year to prevent corruption. This year the Nigerian Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre, TI’s national chapter, issued a statement putting the CPI in context and highlighting reforms underway and where more needs to be done.

Most importantly, rather than using the release of the CPI to criticize the many Nigerian public servants who spend their days fighting corruption, it went out of its way to applaud them, saying:

“It is important to stress that [the CPI score] is not an assessment of Nigeria’s anti-graft agencies who are making commendable efforts in reducing (in the fight against) corruption in Nigeria despite the political interference they face.

The full text of the Advocacy Centre’s statement follows. It merits close study by all those looking for ways to transform the annual, dreary, unproductive ritual around release of the CPI into something that can help produce results in the fight against corruption.

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Re-Upping Last Year’s Post on How (Not) to Cover the About-To-Be-Released CPI

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Later this week (tomorrow, I believe) Transparency International (TI) will release the newest version of its annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). I was going to do a post on this, but I realized as I started writing it that what I had to say was virtually identical to what I wrote at this time list year. So I’m just going to paste below the text of last year’s post, while noting my sincere hope that by next year, or at least within a few years, this will no longer be relevant: Continue reading →

From the Permit Raj to the Billionaire Raj: Corruption, Liberalization, and Income Inequality in India

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For over a year, tens of thousands of Indian farmers camped on the highways of New Delhi in protest of three new agricultural laws heralded by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Those laws proposed a national framework for liberalizing the country’s heavily-regulated agricultural markets, allowing farmers to sell their crop yields on the private market rather than selling at fixed prices in government-regulated wholesale markets. While Modi and other proponents of the laws argued that these regulated markets failed to improve farmers’ livelihoods and were rife with corruption, opponents feared that the laws would create an unregulated free market dominated by large, exploitative corporations. On September 5, the protests against the laws culminated in a mass rally of over half a million farmers. Two months later, Modi announced that he would be repealing the laws, a stunning public reversal that few had expected from the ordinarily unyielding Prime Minister. 

To put these most recent developments in a broader context, the dispute over the farm laws showcases a debate over liberalization and deregulation in India that has been raging for more than half a century. It is a story not only of competing visions for the country’s economy, but also of the deep interrelation between corruption and income inequality. As the agriculture fight demonstrates, liberalization has been offered as a mechanism to solve both problems. But a closer look at India’s experience with liberalization complicates this theory. Liberalization may have helped fuel the country’s precipitous economic rise, but it only further exacerbated income inequality while further entrenching the systems of corruption that favor the country’s wealthy elite. At best, unchecked liberalization in India has simply repackaged corruption in new forms; at worst, it has allowed corruption to flourish.

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Public Procurement in Peru: Three Urgent Reforms to Curb Corruption

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Peru is in the midst of yet another major corruption scandal, this one involving a cartel of companies called the Construction Club. The Club allegedly operated as a bid-rigging cartel for major public construction works, in which the members of the Club would decide which one of them would win any given public contract and at what price, and the other Club members would deliberately submit higher bids to create the illusion of a competitive process. What started as an antitrust scandal has turned into a corruption scandal, as the Club is also accused of bribing public officials (including former President Vizcarra) to “guarantee the functioning of the cartel”.

The alleged bribery and bid-rigging are shocking but not surprising. This sort of corruption is all too common in the public procurement process in Peru and elsewhere (see here, here, and here). The vulnerability to corruption stems largely from the lack of accountability and transparency in the public procurement process, as well as the lack of professionalism in the public service. Can anything be done to address these longstanding problems? While there is no simple or overnight solution, there are in fact a number of measures that Peru can and should adopt to address the corruption vulnerabilities in its public procurement process and reduce the likelihood of another incident like the Club scandal recurring in the future.

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The Netherlands’ Dutch Caribbean Problem

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The Kingdom of the Netherlands has a corruption problem. Although the country of Netherlands maintains a squeaky-clean image, ranking eighth in the world on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), the Kingdom of the Netherlands is comprised of not only the Netherlands itself, but also three semi-autonomous island countries in the Caribbean. These island countries, along with three territorial islands directly controlled by the Netherlands, collectively form the Dutch Caribbean. And the Dutch Caribbean, unlike the Western European country, has a serious corruption problem, the severity of which is being diluted by the positive perceptions of the Netherlands.

Before addressing corruption in the Dutch Caribbean specifically, it’s worth explaining the Kingdom’s somewhat unusual constituent-country structure. Technically speaking, the Kingdom is composed of four equal autonomous countries: The Netherlands, Aruba, Curacao, and Sint Maarten. The citizens of all four countries are Dutch nationals. Each country has its own constitution and parliament, but the Kingdom is sovereign, retaining responsibility for foreign policy, defense, and other “Kingdom issues,” including oversight of human rights and freedoms within all Kingdom territories. Of the four countries that comprise the Kingdom, the Netherlands is by far the largest, accounting for 98% of both the Kingdom’s land mass and population. And although Aruba, Curacao, and Sint Maarten each have a representative within the Kingdom’s council of ministers, the Netherlands in effect also directly controls the Kingdom, as well as the Caribbean islands of Bonaire, Saba, and Sint Eustatius, which are Dutch territories.

Most international corruption assessments lump the Dutch Caribbean in together with the Netherlands. The CPI, for example, does not include separate evaluations for Aruba, Curacao, or Sint Maarten, nor does the U.S. State Department. The tendency to consider the Dutch Caribbean as part of the Netherlands, and to provide a single report or score for “the Netherlands” as a whole, obscures the fact that the Dutch Caribbean does, in fact, have a very serious corruption problem on each of its constituent islands, as the following brief survey illustrates:

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Highway Robbery: Preventing Corruption in U.S. Infrastructure Investment

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Last November, President Biden signed into law the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), a $1.2 trillion package that earmarks $110 billion for repairing and rebuilding roads and bridges. This is the single largest investment in U.S. roads and bridges since the construction of the interstate highway system in the mid twentieth century. And though it is a federal project, much of the money will be distributed to state governments, which will determine how best to use the money to address their infrastructure needs. As state governments receive the IIJA money, we can expect the states to launch a public tender frenzy.

In all the extensive discussion and debate over the IIJA, there has been relatively little focus on the corruption risks inherent in this sort of spending program—even in an affluent, reasonably well-governed country like the United States. After all, corruption in large construction projects, and infrastructure projects like roadbuilding in particular, is all too common. Unfortunately, the IIJA’s design exacerbates rather than reduces these corruption risks. While it is too late to address those flaws in the statute, there are some measures that the federal government can and should adopt now to mitigate the inherent corruption risks. Continue reading →

Has Nigeria Found A Way to Make Release of the CPI Useful?

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Transparency International releases its 2021 Corruption Perceptions Index this January 25, and while many will welcome the attention it puts on corruption, for others release will mean nothing but headaches. They will spend that day and the days and perhaps weeks after trying to explain why their country’s score on the CPI has little or nothing to do with how well the country is doing in the fight against corruption.  

For regulars in the corruption battle, this is common knowledge (distilled here, here, and here).  They know the value of the CPI lies in the pressure release puts on governments to take the fight against corruption seriously – not in measuring the progress a government is making in the fight. But presidents, prime ministers, parliamentarians, and assorted national kibitzers don’t. Sporadic followers of the corruption issue, on January 25 they will read that their nation ranks worse on the CPI than some neighboring county, a rival, or Denmark, Norway, or Singapore. They will demand to know why. Or at least why efforts over the past year have not paid off in a better ranking.

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Do Individual U.S. Senators Manipulate the Timing of FCPA Enforcement Actions? (Spoiler: No.)

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Is enforcement of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) improperly politicized? The notion that it is has gained traction in some circles, particularly in countries with multinational firms that have been sanctioned by U.S. authorities for FCPA violations, such as France and Brazil. The usual claim by those who assert that FCPA enforcement is politicized is that the US Department of Justice (DOJ) deploys the FCPA as a kind of protectionist weapon against foreign multinationals that compete with US firms. But a recent working paper by two business school professors (one American and one Chinese) claims to have found evidence for a different sort or FCPA politicization. According to this paper, individual U.S. Senators exert behind-the-scenes influence over the DOJ to manipulate the timing of FCPA enforcement actions against foreign corporations. More specifically, the paper argues that when a Senator is up for reelection, he or she will influence the DOJ to announce an enforcement action against a foreign company before, rather than after, the election. Doing so, the authors suggest, helps the Senator’s reelection chances by imposing a cost on a foreign company that competes with domestic firms in the Senator’s state.

I confess that when I first saw this paper a few weeks ago, I didn’t take it too seriously, because the central argument seemed so obviously detached from reality. (I also didn’t have time to dig into the details of the empirical methods, which are somewhat involved.) But the paper seems to generated a bit of buzz—including a Tweet from one of the best and most respected economists who works on corruption-related issues, which specifically asked me and a few others for our reactions to some of the “provocative” evidence presented in the paper. So I took a closer look. Continue reading →

Is the United Kingdom a Corrupt Country? Confronting Parliament’s Conflict-of-Interest Problem

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Prime Minister Boris Johnson recently declared that he does not believe the United Kingdom is “remotely a corrupt country.” And indeed, international indexes (such as Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index) indicate that most observers perceive the UK as having high levels of public integrity. But while the British state may be free from the routine bribery and embezzlement that is common elsewhere, the UK Parliament is awash in conflicts of interest. Such self-dealing by the political class—what many in the UK press have dubbed “sleaze”—suggests that the country suffers more from corruption (albeit a different kind of corruption) than many observers realize.

The most recent “sleaze” scandal—and the one that prompted Prime Minister Johnson’s defense of the UK’s overall record on corruption—involved Conservative MP Owen Paterson, a former Environment Minister. Paterson received hundreds of thousands of pounds consulting for a clinical diagnostics firm and a meat processor, in violation of the UK’s longstanding ban on MPs acting as paid lobbyists. Even more damning, Paterson pressed the government to act against the meat processor’s competitor, and the government awarded the diagnostics testing company a £133 million pound contract despite the company lacking adequate equipment. While this scandal may have revealed especially egregious conflicts-of-interest, it is not an isolated incident. Consider just a handful of additional examples of instances in which MPs earned outside income from positions that would seem to create a serious conflict:

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