Tag Archives: Senegal

Adjusting Corruption Perception Index Scores for National Wealth

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My post two weeks ago discussed Transparency International’s newly-released 2017 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), focusing in particular on an old hobby-horse of mine: the hazards of trying to draw substantive conclusions from year-to-year changes in any individual country’s CPI score. Today I want to continue to discuss the 2017 CPI, with attention to a different issue: the relationship between a country’s wealth and its CPI score. It’s no secret that these variables are highly correlated. Indeed, per capita GDP remains the single strongest predictor of a country’s perceived corruption level, leading some critics to suggest that the CPI doesn’t really measure perceived corruption so much as it measures wealth—penalizing poor countries by portraying them as more corrupt, when in fact their corruption may be due more to their poverty than to deficiencies in their cultures, policies, and institutions.

This criticism isn’t entirely fair. Per capita income is a strong predictor of CPI scores, but they’re far from perfectly correlated. Furthermore, even if it’s true that worse (perceived) corruption is in large measure a product of worse economic conditions, that doesn’t mean there’s a problem with the CPI as such, any more than a measure of infant mortality is flawed because it is highly correlated with per capita income. (And of course because corruption may worsen economic outcomes, the correlation between wealth and CPI scores may be a partial reflection of corruption’s impact, though I doubt there are many who think that this relationship is so strong that the causal arrow runs predominantly from corruption to national wealth rather than from national wealth to perceived corruption.)

Yet the critics do have a point: When we look at the CPI results table, we see a lot of very rich countries clustered at the top, and a lot of very poor countries clustered at the bottom. That’s fine for some purposes, but we might also be interested in seeing which countries have notably higher or lower levels of perceived corruption than we would expect, given their per capita incomes. As a crude first cut at looking into this, I merged the 2017 CPI data table with data from the World Bank on 2016 purchasing-power-adjusted per capita GDP. After dropping the countries that appeared in one dataset but not the other, I had a 167 countries. I then ran a simple regression using CPI as the outcome variable and the natural log of per capita GDP as the sole explanatory variable. (I used the natural log partly to reduce the influence of extreme income outliers, and partly on the logic that the impact of GDP on perceived corruption likely declines at very high levels of income. But I admit it’s something of an arbitrary choice and I encourage others who are interested to play around with the data using alternative functional forms and specifications.)

This single variable, ln per capita GDP, explained about half of the total variance in the data (for stats nerds, the R2 value was about 0.51), meaning that while ln per capita GDP is a very powerful explanatory variable, there’s a lot of variation in the CPI that it doesn’t explain. The more interesting question, to my mind, concerns the countries that notably outperform or underperform the CPI score that one would predict given national wealth. To look into this, I simply ranked the 167 countries in my data by the size of the residuals from the simple regression described above. Here are some of the things that I found: Continue reading →

The New Corruption Perceptions Index Identifies Countries with Statistically Significant Changes in Perceived Corruption–Should We Credit the Results?

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As most readers of this blog are likely aware, last month Transparency International (TI) released the 2017 edition of its important and influential Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). As usual, the publication of the CPI triggered a fair bit of media coverage, much of it focused on how various countries ranked, and how individual country scores had changed from one year to the next (see, for example, here, here, here, and here).

There’s a lot to say about the most recent CPI—I may devote a post at some point to TI’s interesting decision to focus the press release accompanying the publication of the 2017 CPI less on the index itself than on the connection between (perceived) corruption and a lack of adequate freedom and protections for the media and civil society. But in this preliminary post, I want to take up an issue that regular GAB readers will know has been something of a fixation of mine in past years: the emphasis—in my view mostly misplaced—on how individual country CPI scores have changed from year to year.

In prior posts, I’ve raised a number of related but distinct concerns about the tendency of some commentators—and, more disturbingly, of some policymakers—to attach great significance to whether a country’s CPI score has gone up or down relative to previous years. For one thing, the sources used to construct the CPI for any given country may change from year to year—and adding or dropping an idiosyncratic source can have a substantial effect on the aggregate CPI score. For another, even when the underlying sources don’t change, we don’t know whether those sources are on the same implicit scale from year to year. And even if we put these problems to one side, a focus on changes in the final CPI score can sometimes obscure the statistical uncertainty associated with the estimated CPI—these scores can be noisy enough that changes in scores, even those that seem large, may not be statistically meaningful according to the conventional tests. Although TI always calculates statistical confidence intervals, in prior years these intervals have been buried in hard-to-find Excel spreadsheets, and the changes in CPI scores that TI highlights in its annual press releases haven’t always been statistically significant by TI’s own calculations. In an earlier post, I suggested that at the very least, TI should provide an easy-to-find, easy-to-read table assessing which changes in country scores are statistically significant at conventional levels, preferably over a 4-year period (as 1-year changes are both harder to detect if trends are gradual, and less interesting).

Apparently some folks within TI were thinking along similar lines, and I was pleased to see that in the 2017 CPI includes a reasonably prominent link to a spreadsheet showing those countries for which the 2017 CPI score showed a “statistically significant difference” from that country’s CPI score in each of five comparison years (2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016).

I’ve still got some criticisms and concerns, which—in the spirit of constructive engagement—I’ll turn to in just a moment. But before getting to that, let me pause to note my admiration for TI as an organization, and in this case its research department in particular, for constantly working to improve both the CPI itself and how it is presented and interpreted. It’s easy for folks like me to criticize—and I’ll continue to do so, in the interests of pushing for further improvements—but it’s much more challenging to absorb the raft of criticisms from so many quarters, sift through them, and invest the necessary time and resources to adapt and adjust from year to year. So, in case any folks at TI are reading this, let me first acknowledge and express my appreciation for how much work (often thankless) goes into the creation and continued improvement of this valuable tool.

Having said that, let me now proceed to raising some comments, questions, and concerns about TI’s claims about countries that appear to have experienced statistically meaningful changes in their CPI scores over the last five years. Continue reading →

Guest Post: The Obiang Trial Suggests Innovative Approaches To Fighting International Corruption

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GAB is pleased to welcome back Frederick Davis, a lawyer in the Paris office of Debevoise & Plimpton, who contributes the following guest post:

Over the past two months, the French Tribunal de Grande Instance in Paris (the principal trial court) heard evidence in the case against Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue (known as Teodorin), on charges of corruption and money laundering, among other allegations. Teodorin is the son of Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, the long-time – and notoriously corrupt – President of Equatorial Guinea, a resource-rich country that also has some of the most widespread poverty in the world. Yet Teodorin, who is currently Vice President , owns vast real estate in Paris, a private jet, a yacht, and a fleet of vintage and modern automobiles, among his other known assets. This case has been discussed extensively on this blog (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), but it’s useful to recap how the case came to trial in the first place:

The case against Teodorin was primarily the result of diligent efforts by NGOs, including the French anticorruption group Sherpa and the French chapter of Transparency International (TI). In 2007, Sherpa and others filed a complaint with the Public Prosecutor in Paris alleging that the ruling families of Equatorial Guinea, Angola, Burkina Faso and the Republic of the Congo held assets in France that were not the fruits of their official salaries. After a brief investigation, the Public Prosecutor dismissed the claims. Several of the NGOs, joined in some instances by citizens of the countries in question, then used a French procedure known as constitution de partie civile to cause a criminal investigation by an investigating magistrate (juge d’instruction). This effort was opposed by the Public Prosecutor. A Court of Appeals initially upheld the prosecutor’s position and dismissed TI’s intervention, but in an important 2010 ruling, the French Cour de Cassation (Supreme Court) ruled that TI was a proper partie civile authorized to instigate the criminal investigation. Ultimately Teodorin was bound over for trial, now with the support of the Public Prosecutor (as well as the continued active participation of TI and other NGOs). A decision is expected in October.

The procedures that brought Obiang to trial are interesting because they highlight four important differences between French and US criminal procedures, and more generally illustrate several legal deficiencies, in countries like the United States, that often hinder the worldwide fight against transnational corruption: Continue reading →