Recent years have shown an increase in policymakers’ investment in anti-corruption, culminating with the European Commission’s Anti-corruption Report, the G7 discussion and PM David Cameron’s dedicated summit later this year. Despite these efforts, a recent OECD report acknowledges that we have no current country case to point to as a successful example of the international anti-corruption strategies. Unprecedented funds are spent on anti-corruption in countries like Ukraine and Egypt with meagre results at best, and spectacular arrests, in the few countries where they happen, do not seem to be followed by a proportional reduction in corruption. State capture, the influence by private interests on the government, seems to explain negative developments in both Europe and accession countries.
This roundtable will present evidence from EU research projects ANTICORRP and DIGIWHIST, as well as the Netherlands Presidency report ‘Public Integrity and Trust in Europe‘, which for the first time go beyond public opinion and subjective data to answer objectively questions such as:
Are EU funds the equivalent of a resource curse, only reinforcing regional corrupt elites, as was already alleged in relation to Greece?
Which anti-corruption instruments work under what context and which do not work regardless of the context?
Can new big data evidence challenge world rankings of corrupt versus non corrupt countries?
How much of the recent changes to the democracies of Hungary, Poland or Turkey are actually related to state capture?
Alina Mungiu-Pippidi and Mihaly Fazekas will present their work on this topic at Bruegel. The presentation will be followed by a panel discussion with Carl Dolan from Transparency International as well as other speakers.
This event will be livestreamed at http://bruegel.org/ starting at 13.00.
The comments are closed.