Breaking the cycle? How (not) to use political finance regulations to counter public procurement corruption

Fazekas, M and Cingolani, L (2017). Breaking the cycle? How (not) to use political finance regulations to counter public procurement corruption. In: The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 95, No. 1, January 2017. URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5699/slaveasteurorev2.95.issue-1

There are widespread perceptions and countless documented cases of tight-knit networks of politicians and businessmen colluding for allocating public procurement contracts in return for political party donations. In the absence of systematic evidence, neither the magnitude of the problem nor the effectiveness of policies …

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Universalistic rules-particularistic implementation: The EU’s single market for government purchases

Fazekas, M and Skohrovec, J (2016). Universalistic rules – particularistic implementation: The EU’s single market for government purchases. GTI-R/2016:01, Budapest: Government Transparency Institute.

Open and fair access to government contracts has been a long-standing principle in many international trade agreements including the one on the EU’s single public procurement market which is probably the most extensive among them with its long standing common regulatory and enforcement framework. However, the ostensibly low prevalence of cross-border trade in European public procurement represents …

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From Corruption to State Capture. A New Analytical Framework with Empirical Applications from Hungary

Fazekas, M. – Tóth, I. J. (2016): From Corruption to State Capture. A New Analytical Framework with Empirical Applications from Hungary. Political Research Quarterly, published online before print on March 24, 2016 

http://prq.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/03/18/1065912916639137.abstract

State capture and corruption are widespread phenomena across the globe, but their empirical study still lacks sufficient analytical tools. This paper develops a new conceptual and analytical framework for gauging state capture based on microlevel contractual networks in public procurement. To this end, it establishes a novel …

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GTI awarded a new major research project by the British Academy

Government Transparency Institute proudly announces that the British Academy and the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) decided to support our joint research project with the University of Sussex and Datlab. The project ‘Curbing corruption in development aid-funded procurement’ aims at developing accurate and targeted indicators of corruption in aid-funded procurement.

We employ our novel corruption proxies to explore how the risks of corruption in aid allocation are affected by different institutional control mechanisms and the socio-political …

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How to Construct a Public Procurement Database from Administrative Records? – Technical Report

Czibik, Á. – Fazekas, M. – Tóth, B. (2015): How to Construct a Public Procurement Database from Administrative Records? GTI-R/2015:02, Budapest: Government Transparency Institute.

This report aims to provide a comprehensive outline of the potential challenges of building a database from publicly available public procurement records and the possible solutions to the identified problems. We use Hungary as an illustrative example as most problems faced in other countries are present there, and so any finding will be widely applicable. The …

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Corruption in EU Funds? Europe-wide evidence on the corruption effect of EU funded public contracting

Fazekas, M. and Tóth, I. J. (2015). Corruption in EU Funds? Europe-wide evidence on the corruption effect of EU funded public contracting. GTI-WP/2015:01, Budapest: Government Transparency Institute.

It is theoretically ambiguous and empirically contested whether EU Funds contribute to lower corruption and better governance or the opposite. Many recipient countries benefit to a substantial degree with allocations amounting to 2-4% of their annual GDP. A range of positive and negative cases has been uncovered by the European Commission, national governments …

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Toolkit for detecting collusive bidding in public procurement – With examples from Hungary

Tóth, B, Fazekas, M, Czibik, Á, Tóth, I. J. (2014). Toolkit for detecting collusive bidding in public procurement – With examples from Hungary. GTI-WP/2014:02, Budapest: Government Transparency Institute.

Based on a synthesis of literature to-date, this paper provides a flexible indicator set deployable as a toolkit across many countries for detecting collusive bidding in public procurement. While no one-size-fits-all approach exists in detecting collusion, robust elementary indicators and analytical tools for adapting them to local contexts can be developed. The …

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From corruption to state capture: A new analytical framework with empirical applications from Hungary

Fazekas, M., Tóth, I. J. (2014). From corruption to state capture: A new analytical framework with empirical applications from Hungary. GTI-WP/2014:01, Budapest: Government Transparency Institute.

State capture and corruption are widespread phenomena across the globe, but their empirical study is still highly challenging. This paper develops a new conceptual and analytical framework for gauging state capture based on micro-level contractual networks in public procurement. To this end, it first establishes a robust measure of corruption risks in public procurement transactions …

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