Author: Ágnes Czibik

Does the Defence Industry Capture the State in France?

Renon, E. (2019). Does the Defence Industry Capture the State in France? GTI-WP/2019:03, London, UK: Government Transparency Institute.

State capture is the disproportionate and unregulated influence of interest groups or companies, where they manage to bend state laws, policies and regulations by paying illicit contributions to political parties and for election campaigns, buy parliamentary votes, presidential decrees or court decisions, as well as through illegitimate lobbying and revolving door appointments. State capture can also arise from the more subtle close …

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The Corruption Cost Tracker: Quantifying the costs of corrupt contracting and the savings to be made from reform

Fazekas, M., Dávid-Barrett, E., Abdou, A., Basdevant, O.  (2020). The Corruption Cost Tracker: Quantifying the costs of corrupt contracting and the savings to be made from reform. GTI-R/2020:02, Budapest: Government Transparency Institute.

Public procurement constitutes about one-third of government spending or 13 trillion USD per year. It is highly vulnerable to corruption with estimates of losses amounting to 10-20%. Corruption in public procurement can lead to: 1) Overpriced public procurement contracts contributing to larger budget deficits. 2) Unfinished, sub-standard delivery …

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How to define and measure corruption

Mungiu-Pippidi A. and Fazekas M. (2020). How to define and measure Corruption. In Alina Mungiu-Pippidi & Paul M. Heywood (eds.) A Research Agenda for Studies of Corruption. Ch. 2. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham.

The measurement of corruption is an essential part of this policy-driven intellectual endeavour. As a United Nations Development Programme review report stated: ‘To put it plainly, there is little value in a measurement if it does not tell us what needs to be fixed’ (UNDP 2008, p. 8). …

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Corruption and the Network Structure of Public Contracting Markets across Government Change

Wachs J. and Fazekas M. (2020). Corruption and the Network Structure of Public Contracting Markets across Government Change. Politics and Governance, 8(2), pp. 153-166.

Corruption is thought to affect developed economies to a greater degree than developing countries. However, given our limited capacity to detect corruption, it may simply be harder to detect it in countries with stronger institutions. This article sets out to address this measurement challenge and to offer a tailored approach to one particular type of corruption: …

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Legislative Effects of Regulatory Impact Assessment: A Comparative Event History Analysis of Modifications of Law in France, Italy, Hungary, and the UK

Brenner, D. and Fazekas, M. (2020). Legislative Effects of Regulatory Impact Assessment: A Comparative Event History Analysis of Modifications of Law in France, Italy, Hungary, and the UK. GTI-WP/2020:03, Budapest: Government Transparency Institute.

Regulatory instability, which is a frequent modification of adopted laws, is costly for society. Regulatory Impact Assessments (RIAs) are designed to improve the quality of legislation, however, we know little about RIAs’ impact on legal stability. Therefore, this paper analyses whether RIAs influence the incidence and frequency …

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The role of agencification in achieving value-for-money in public spending

Cingolani L. & Fazekas, M. (2020). The role of agencification in achieving value-for-money in public spending. Governance. Available online: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/gove.12452

Agencification has been pursued globally under the promise of increasing public administration performance. In spite of ample theoretical arguments, the empirical evidence on the causal link between agencification and performance remains scarce and methodologically contested. We contribute to this debate by empirically testing the impacts of agencification across Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom on value-for-money, competitiveness, and timeliness
…

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Anti-corruption in aid-funded procurement: Is corruption reduced or merely displaced?

David-Barrett E. and Fazekas, M. (2020). Anti-corruption in aid-funded procurement: Is corruption reduced or merely displaced? World Development. Available online: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2020.105000

Given a widespread sense among donors that mainstream anti-corruption reforms over the past 25 years have failed to yield results, there is a move towards more targeted interventions. Such interventions should, in principle, overcome implementation gaps and make it easier to evaluate impact, supporting learning. However, when interventions are narrowly targeted, there is a risk that corrupt actors simply …

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Corruption risk in contracting markets: A network science perspective

Wachs,J., Fazekas, M., Kertész, J. (2020). Corruption risk in contracting markets: A network science perspective. International Journal of Data Science and Analytics. Available online.

We use methods from network science to analyze corruption risk in a large administrative dataset of over 4 million public procurement contracts from European Union member states covering the years 2008–2016. By mapping procurement markets as bipartite networks of issuers and winners of contracts, we can visualize and describe the distribution of corruption risk. We study …

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Data update of World Bank, IADB, and EuropeAid datasets on development aid funded contracts and projects

The DFID-funded project “Curbing Corruption in Government Contracting” is releasing an update on the datasets collected on development projects, public tenders, and contracts for three major donor agencies: the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), and EuropeAid. The datasets not only republish structured data gathered from official source websites, but also contain corruption risk red flags developed by the research team.

About the project

The project entitled “Curbing Corruption in Government Contracting” analyses how procurement can be manipulated for …

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Development aid funded contracts and projects: World Bank, IADB, and EuropeAid datasets

The project, “Curbing corruption in development aid-funded procurement” is releasing the full datasets collected on development projects, public tenders, and contracts for 3 major donor agencies: the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and EuropeAid. The project was supported by the British Academy/ UK Department for International Development Anti-Corruption Evidence Programme. The final datasets result from a concerted effort by GTI, the University of Sussex and Datlab. In addition to republishing structured data gathered from official source …

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