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This is the World Bank's blog on governance and anti-corruption. It aims at providing a space for debate and knowledge sharing on this critical field of development. | Learn more...

June 2008

Media & Broadcasting Policy Supports Governance Agenda: New Bank Book is a Practical Guide

Submitted by Tia on Fri, 2008-06-27 13:08

Good governance and accountability depend on informed, effective citizen participation. This can’t happen without media  that provide broad access to information from varied sources and let people raise and debate issues. Sound media policies – particularly in broadcasting  – enable the public to make informed decisions, avoid manipulation, hold government to account, grasp development opportunities, and build people’s capacities to engage each other and government. That’s why these policies have to be an early component of governance reform.

IFAI and the agenda for transparency in Mexico

Submitted by Kaufmann on Sun, 2008-06-15 13:28
 
Mexico has become one of the best governmental examples of transparency and access to information. In 2002, the Congress enacted the Access to Public Information and Transparency Law that establishes that all the information held by the federal government is public. Since then, the Federal Institute for Access to Information (IFAI) has played a key role in carrying out this mandate of openness. It guarantees access to information law, protects citizens’ personal information held by the government, and investigates and resolves cases where public agencies refused to provide information. The IFAI has trained several federal staffers on how to comply with ATI law requirements.
 
The ATI law and IFAI implementation have produced 250,000 requests for information  between 2003 and 2007 – most of them done electronically. About 88 percent of the requests received a response, and IFAI addressed more than 12,000 appeals because the information was either denied or not produced in a satisfactory manner. Statistics do not include basic information that Mexicans  can get online like wages, organizational structure, hiring, or budget. Release of this data – mandatory for every federal office – does not require a formal request. But only 20 percent of the population has access to the Internet. Furthermore,  only 50 percent of citizens are aware of  the ATI law and the IFAI.
 

Mexico creates model for tackling corruption in tax administration

Submitted by Kaufmann on Fri, 2008-06-13 13:20
 Corruption in the administration of taxes presents several challenges to governments in developing countries. The main reasons are the complexity of the tax system, the level of discretion that tax officials enjoy when they interact with taxpayers, and the lack of capacity to monitor transactions and enforce tax laws. Governments must be readier to face the reality that a tax system undermined by corruption reduces revenue, which in turn degrades the quality of public services. This dynamic limits the potential for economic growth.

Does citizen involvement in the public sector work? The case of the Federal Electoral Institute in Mexico

Submitted by Kaufmann on Fri, 2008-06-06 13:25
Elections have been conducted uninterruptedly in Mexico over the last eight decades, but their fairness and transparency often encountered tough questioning. The strong presidential system that was both judge and jury in elections limited governmental representation by pluralities in Mexican society.
 
After years of debate, the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) was set up as a permanent and autonomous public organization to organize and arbitrate federal elections. IFE’s most important feature is a general council composed of citizens with nonpartisan affiliation who are appointed with the support of two-thirds of the House of Representatives. With this reform, citizens instead of the executive branch became the principal decision makers in the electoral process.  In another reform, randomly selected citizens were appointed as observers at polling sites. They not only watch over the entire voting process, including making sure it is free and secret, but also personally count votes and disclose results to the community.
 
This close citizens’ involvement in the electoral process helped create a trustworthy system that today is globally recognized. Between 1997 and 2003, it fostered more plural representation in Congress and led to the first victory of a presidential candidate from the opposition in 71 years.
 

Does Rule of Law Matter for Economic Development?

Submitted by Kaufmann on Sun, 2008-06-01 17:37

A recent article in the Economist deals with this question.  It sparked some debate.  Too many publications, including at the Bank, rush to interpret a simple correlations between two variables as one having a causal impact on the other (and which one drives the other depends on the prior of the author). The survey article in the Economist does not fall into that trap.  After all, as the saying goes, correlation is superstition, while causality is science... 

A superficial plotgram chart correlating incomes and rule of law can be mistakenly interpreted to suggest that Rule of Law is a ‘luxury good’: countries become better governed because they are wealthy and can afford better rules and better implementation of these rules. 

At the 'micro'-level, a flip side of this misguided view is the claim that many public servants extract bribes because they are poor.  Poverty becomes an excuse to obtain a special ‘discount’ from the actual extent of “misrule” of law in a country.  Yet claiming poverty as an extenuating circumstance to justify a special dispensation from working on improved governance makes sense only if the direction of causality were to run from higher incomes to governance improvements, not vice versa.  A body of research does not support such direction of causality.