Unbundling Corruption: Why it matters and how to do it

Even amid a global pandemic, corruption persists and manifests itself in multiple forms, ranging from corrupt police extorting truck drivers delivering essential goods, rigged procurement contracts, to politically connected corporations receiving huge bailouts from the government while small businesses are starved of loans they desperately need to stay afloat. Although all of these actions are corrupt, they involve very different actors and stakes; some are transactional while others are extractive; and each brings about vastly different consequences.

Yet the conventional way of measuring corruption across countries does not capture qualitative distinctions across types of corruption. Instead, standard indices—most notably, the Corruption Perception Index (CPI)—measure corruption as a one-dimensional problem, ranging from 0 to 100. Consistently, rich countries rank at the top while poor countries are stuck at the bottom.

Because these indices are the primary—indeed the only—source for tracking corruption around the world, they have profoundly shaped the way everyone thinks about corruption. They result in a fixation with overall quantities of corruption and global rankings, at the expense of measuring and understanding the effects of different qualities of corruption.

Instead of asking “Which country is most (or least) corrupt?”, both analysts and practitioners should consider a different set of questions: “Which country is dominated by what type of corruption? Why? With what consequences? How can we fight different types of corruption?”

In order to address these questions, we must begin by creating an unbundled index of corruption.

Συνέχεια ανάγνωσης εδώ

Πηγή: oecd-development-matters.org