The goal of this report is to provide an assessment of the impact of corruption on development by focusing on infrastructure through a survey of EU-funded infrastructure projects in selected countries. Our Country reports focus on the construction sector because this sector is indicated by nearly every source as the highest public investment and top risk […]
Public procurement, one of the largest areas of public spending worldwide, gives public officials wide discretion. It is therefore unsurprising that it is also one of the government functions most often vulnerable to corruption. While there have been many qualitative accounts of high-level corruption in public contracting, it is only recently that quantitative indicators have […]
Why do officials in some countries favor entrenched contractors while others assign public contracts more impartially? According to the research, such variation responds to differences in political institutions, economic development and historical preconditions. This paper instead emphasizes the interplay between politics and bureaucracy. It suggests that corruption risks are minimized when the two groups involved […]
Across the globe, the exposure of collusive behaviour of companies in procurement markets is predominantly based on qualitative information from firms or individuals involved in collusion. This makes detection rare and titled towards disintegrating bidding rings. Economic analysis, modelling and forecasting have a limited role in this field. However, the increasing availability of large administrative […]
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 […]
The paper explores the impact of EU funds on institutionalised grand corruption in public procurement between 2009-2012 in three countries: Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia. We analyse a unique pooled database containing contract-level public procurement information for all three countries. We develop a composite corruption risks indicator based on the incidence and logical structure of […]
Although both the academic and policy communities have attached great importance to measuring corruption, most of the currently available measures are biased and too broad to test theory or guide policy. This article proposes a new composite indicator of grand corruption based on a wide range of elementary indicators. These indicators are derived from a […]
This paper develops 30 novel quantitative indicators of grand corruption that operationalize 20 distinct techniques of corruption in the context of public procurement. Each indicator rests on a thorough qualitative understanding of rent extraction from public contracts by corrupt networks as evidenced by academic literature, interviews and media content analysis. Feasibility and usefulness of the […]
A central task of DIGIWHIST is to collect publicly available data about public procurement across Europe. The collection of such data and other complementary datasets is the main goal of WP2. This document is a data management plan that describes, in compliance with the guidelines on H2020 FAIR Data Management, how data will be collected, […]