The World Bank - Working for a world free of poverty

Syndicate content
A blog about Governance and Development for All

About us

Welcome

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...

Measurement Frontiers

Arab Human Development Report 2009: Will improvement in Voice and Rights come from within?

Submitted by Kaufmann on Mon, 2009-08-03 20:57

A few weeks ago Obama went to Ghana and delivered a major speech to Africa.  He spoke candidly about the dire governance challenges faced by many countries in the continent.  I also noted that Obama was not explicit about the implications of his message for rethinking donor aid strategies to the continent. Hopefully such revamp in donor aid will be part of the follow through of his speech, if there is follow through.

A month before his momentous trip to Accra to address the Ghanian Parliament, Obama had gone to Cairo to deliver a major address to the Arab world.  It is a speech, which is also worth studying in depth.  But it was more muted and unfocused, refraining from being too direct on the governance and freedom deficits in the Arab world. For one, Obama is not seen as a prodigal son there, in contrast with how he is regarded by Africa...

WGI pillars

6
The number of aggregate indicators of the quality of governance, as measured by the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI): Voice and Accountability, Political Stability, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law and Control of Corruption.
Find out more »

Governance Matters 2009: Learning From Over a Decade of the Worldwide Governance Indicators

Submitted by Kaufmann on Mon, 2009-06-29 11:15

Today we are releasing the report Governance Matters VIII, which includes the new update of the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI).   Now collaborating from the Brookings Institution, I continue to take part in this research project with my former World Bank colleagues Aart Kraay and Massimo Mastruzzi.

Global Corruption Barometer 2009: people's experience and perception about corruption

Submitted by Alfredo on Thu, 2009-06-04 13:52

Transparency International released its 2009 Global Corruption Barometer.   As opposed to TI's expert opinion survey -the Corruption Perception Index-, the Barometer is a public opinion survey that captures perceptions and experiences of corruption of more than 73,000 people in 69 countries.

Some of the corruption issues addressed by the survey are: perception of corruption in the private sector, petty bribery in general and in different services, perception of most corruption institutions/sectors, corruption denunciation and use of complaint mechanisms, and perception of governments' effectiveness in the fight against corruption.

Among the main results in this year's survey are:

Global Integrity Index: looking around the black box of corruption

Submitted by Alfredo on Fri, 2009-02-20 15:40

A couple of days ago, Global Integrity launched its Global Integrity Index 2008, which assesses whether or not key national anti-corruption mechanisms are set in place, work properly and are accessible to citizens to hold governments accountable. 

Different from other governance measurements, this index and the scorecard doesn't try looking into the black box of corruption or the perceptions about it.  Instead, the approach is to look at the inputs and outputs coming in and out of the box, trying to show the difference between de jure and de facto institutional realities of countries and how political economy dynamics within them matter.

Open Budget Index and the need of transparency in government spending

Submitted by Alfredo on Mon, 2009-02-09 16:52

Last week the International Budget Partnership (IBP) released its 2008 version of the Open Budget Index (OBI), which analyzes budget transparency in 85 countries all around the world.   Among its main findings, the OBI shows that the level of transparency in the budgetary process is deporable in most of the evaluated countries -only 5 percent of them provide adequate information on spending to the public, while almost 30 percent of them provide very few or any information at all.

Although a group of countries are moving forward on this matter, the current state of budget transparency opens the door to waste and misappropriation of public funds in most places.   This situation is and will always be delicate, but in this time of expansionary and stimulus policies, an appropriate disclosure of the use of resources becomes very sensitive. 

Capture and the Financial Crisis: An Elephant forcing a rethink of Corruption?

Submitted by Kaufmann on Mon, 2008-11-03 01:48

Mushrooming analysis of the determinants of the financial crisis are all over the web.  They range from simplistic and blanket accusations of the ‘greed’ of the market capitalism to the arcane technical explanation of a misguided regulatory covenant on the other. And the spectrum is crowded, including the misstep by Treasury Secretary Paulson in letting Lehman fail that fateful weekend.

When all is said and done, some consensus may emerge about which particular combination of a few fundamental factors, coupled with recent policy and oversight failure, were culprits. I am not weighing in now on what the precise ingredients of such debacle were.  Instead, I want to focus on one factor that has often been kept under wraps:  the regulatory and policy capture by vested interests.  This has been years in the making.  And we have been researching and measuring the notion of capture for a decade, and providing some general warning. A frank and open debate about this issue, grounded on sound analytics and data, is overdue.

Mo Ibrahim Foundation: promoting good governance and leadership in Africa

Submitted by Alfredo on Thu, 2008-10-09 10:37

“Without good governance, Africa will go nowhere.”  This is the vision behind the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, a $400 million African initiative that aims building a better Africa by supporting civil society and democratic African leaders in the promotion of good governance.  While some of the Foundation’s approaches are traditional among governance practitioners, others are less common, such as a monetary prize for sub-Saharan African leaders committed to good governance and democracy.

On the civil society front, the Mo Ibrahim Foundation launched this week the second round of the Ibrahim Index of African Governance, a governance assessment and ranking of 48 sub-Saharan African countries according to five general criteria: (i) safety and security, (ii) rule of law, transparency and corruption, (iii) participation and human rights, (iv) sustainable economic opportunity, and (v) human development.  As other governance indicators, the Ibrahim Index’s goal is to assist citizens in holding their governments accountable and to highlight areas requiring a better performance.

The dilemmas of measuring corruption: is there an agreement of where should we move on?

Submitted by Alfredo on Thu, 2008-09-25 16:00

As corruption issues around the world seem to be endless, so is the debate about the best way to develop and use corruption indicators.  Whether aggregate or disaggregated; whether actionable or not; whether perception-based or experience-based; whether they should measure inputs or outputs; and whether assessments should be locally-owned or conducted by international institutions are just part of the on-going discussions in open forums and informal chats.

This month we witnessed the publication of two valuable efforts that move towards different directions on corruption measurement: (i) the 2008 Corruption Perception Index launched this week by Transparency International; and (ii) “A Users’ Guide to Measuring Corruption,” published at the beginning of this month by the UNDP Oslo Governance Centre and Global Integrity. 

While Transparency International’s approach relies on composite, cross-country and perception-based indicators, the User’s Guide suggests –among other things– the need for more locally owned assessments that capture the voice and experience of the poor and minority groups, as well as actionable measurements that give a better sense of what needs to be reformed.