Tag Archives: Corruption Perceptions Index

Let’s Create Sub-National Corruption Perception Indexes for the BRICS

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For all their flaws, the major cross-country corruption indexes—Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), the World Bank Institute’s Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI), and the like—have been quite useful, both for research (at least when used appropriately) and for advocacy.  But one important limitation of these datasets is that by focusing on corruption (or perceived corruption) at the country level, they may obscure the fact that there can be substantial within-country variation in the level of (perceived) corruption.  This variation may occur across government institutions—the same country may have quite different degrees of corruption in the health sector, the police force, the judiciary, customs, etc.  More pertinent here, there may also be significant heterogeneity across regions, particularly in large countries with substantial political decentralization.  Indeed, numerous studies have exploited within-country regional variation in corruption levels to test various hypotheses about corruption’s causes and consequences; such studies include research on Italy, Russia, China, the Philippines, and the United States, among others.  But these studies typically make use of particular data sets that are not reproduced year-to-year.

As we’re starting to see rapidly diminishing returns from the major cross-country corruption datasets, it is high time for those organizations with the resources and capacity to compile information on corruption perceptions on an ongoing basis to turn their focus to within-country regional variation in corruption.  I propose the creation of a sub-national corruption perceptions index (snCPI), starting with the so-called BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), which would gather and compile data (primarily perception-based data, perhaps supplemented with more objective data when available) on perceived corruption levels within the major sub-national units (states/provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities) within each of those countries.

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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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Does the Social Value of Corruption Indicators Depend Solely on Their Accuracy?

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We’ve had a series of posts this week (from Michael, Rick, and Addar) about the vexed question of how to measure corruption–including controversies over whether the popular perception-based measures, like Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), do so accurately enough to be useful proxies.

But in addition to that discussion — and picking up on something Rick touched on in the latter half of his post — I think it may be worth raising the questions whether: (1) something like the CPI might have desirable effects even if the CPI score is not a particularly good indicator of true corruption, and (2) whether the CPI might have bad effects even if it’s actually quite an accurate measure. To be clear, my very strong predispositions are that we should try to produce and publicize accurate measures of corruption. But it’s at least worth thinking about the possibility that the social value of an indicator may not depend entirely on the accuracy of that indicator–and about what implications might follow from that observation. Continue reading →

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 →

Transparency International’s Muddled Use of “Corruption,” and Why It Matters

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What corruption means informs what and how anticorruption reformers reform.

Unfortunately, Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) dodges this important issue by averaging together the responses from polls employing competing definitions of “corruption.”  This is a problem because different types of corruption have different causes, have different effects, and require different types of remedies. Transparency International should disaggregate its index of perceived “corruption” into two distinct indices: one for perceptions of illegal corruption, and one for primarily legal (but distrust-generating) conduct, which could fairly be characterized as institutional corruption.  This change would make the CPI more precise, better educating the press, public, and policymakers who rely on it. Continue reading →