Author: Isabelle Adam

GTI wins the IMF Anti-Corruption Challenge

Isabelle Adam

The Government Transparency Institute and FCDO UK team has won the first place in the IMF Anti-Corruption Challenge with its project Public procurement corruption risks: Harnessing Big Data for better fiscal governance and growth. We also worked together with the IMF to deliver this innovative project.

See our presentation followed by a Q&A at the IMF Pitch Event

We developed an intelligence tool which uses big data analytics and peer-reviewed methods to identify corruption risks in micro-level public procurement processes and estimate their impact on prices. The pilot dashboard covering 5 countries enables policy makers, first, to explore corruption risks …

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Are emerging technologies helping win the fight against corruption? A review of the state of evidence

Isabelle Adam

Adam, I. & Fazekas, M. (2020). Are emerging technologies helping win the fight against corruption? A review of the state of evidence. GTI-WP 2020:02, Budapest: Government Transparency Institute.

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is often thought of as a uniformly positive tool making governments more transparent, accountable, and less corrupt. However, the evidence on it is mixed and often misunderstood. Hence, this article carries out a systematic stocktaking of ICT tools’ impact on corruption, offering a nuanced and context-dependent assessment. The tools reviewed are digital public services, crowdsourcing platforms, whistleblowing tools, transparency portals, big data, distributed ledger technology, and artificial …

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India’s Federal Procurement Data Infrastructure: Observations and Recommendations

Isabelle Adam

Adam, I., Tóth, B., Dávid-Barret, E., Fazekas, M. (2020). India’s Federal Procurement Data Infrastructure: Observations and Recommendations. GTI-R/2020:1, Budapest: Government Transparency Institute.

Improving transparency in public procurement, that is publishing more and better-quality data, supports accountability by enabling greater scrutiny over processes and outcomes as well as helping to achieve greater competition and better value for money. In India, according to the Ministry of Finance General Financial Rules (2017), all procuring authorities are responsible and accountable for ensuring transparency, fairness, equality, competition and appeal rights in contracting. The transparency principle is about making information easily accessible to the public: it …

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Measuring the benefits of open contracting: Case studies on Mexico, Paraguay, and Slovakia

Isabelle Adam

Adam, I., Fazekas, M. & Tóth, B. (2020). Measuring the benefits of open contracting: Case studies on Mexico, Paraguay, and Slovakia. GTI-WP/2020:01, Budapest: Government Transparency Institute.

Find a blog on this paper here.

Enhancing the transparency of government in general and of public procurement processes in particular has been increasingly on the agenda of governments, civil societies and businesses as evidenced by initiatives such as the Open Government Partnership which has seen 70 OGP members making 189 open contracting commitments by March 2019[1]. In spite of such major policy developments, we still lack the specific and rigorous …

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Lights on the shadows of public procurement: Transparency as an antidote to corruption

Isabelle Adam

Bauhr, M., Czibik, Á., Fazekas, M., and de Fine Licht, J. (2019). Lights on the Shadows of Public Procurement. Transparency as an antidote to corruption. Governance, 33(3).

The increased focus on marketizing mechanisms and contracting‐out operations following the New Public Management reform agenda has sparked a debate on whether the close interactions between public and private actors might drive corruption in the public sector. The main response to those worries has been increased transparency, but so far empirical evidence of its efficiency remains scant and mixed. This article argues that the beneficial effects of transparency on corruption are contingent on …

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