Early last month, UN Secretary General António Guterres delivered some brief opening remarks to the Security Council at a meeting on the relationship between corruption and conflict. In these remarks, Secretary General Guterres cited a couple of statistics about the economic costs of corruption: an estimate, attributed to the World Economic Forum (WEF), that the global cost of corruption is $2.6 trillion (or 5% of global GDP), as well as another estimate, attributed to the World Bank, that individuals and businesses cumulatively pay over $1 trillion in bribes each year. And last week, in her opening remarks at the International Anti-Corruption Conference, former Transparency International chair Huguette Labelle repeated these same figures.

Those statistics, as I’ve explained in prior posts (see here and here) are bogus. I realize that Secretary General Guterres’ invocation of those numbers shouldn’t bother me so much, since these figures had no substantive importance in his speech, and the speech itself was just the usual collection of platitudes and bromides about how corruption is bad, how the international community needs to do more to fight it, that the UN is a key player in the global effort against corruption, blah blah blah. Ditto for Ms. Labelle–her speech used these numbers kind of like a rhetorical garnish, to underscore the point that corruption is widespread and harmful, a point with which I very much agree. But just on principle, I feel like it’s important to set the right tone for evidence-based policymaking by eschewing impressive-sounding numbers that do not stand up to even mild scrutiny. Just to recap: Continue reading →