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How does one measure corruption? Is it possible to measure corruption? Is a survey that is only based on perceptions of corruption even worth the paper it's written on?
How does one measure corruption? Is it possible to measure corruption? Is a survey that is only based on perceptions of corruption even worth the paper it's written on?
The unveiling last week of Transparency International’s (TI) Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) heralded much comment in the media, not least due to the fact that the United States is no longer in the top 20 least corrupt countries in the world (based on perception).
Blake Hounshell, blogging for Foreign Policy, was quick to jump on the fact that the United States, newly ranked at 22, now falls below Qatar at 19.
“Obviously, anyone who’s been (to Qatar) will recognize the absurdity of the ranking (after all, the Qatar government is basically run by one family that also owns or controls a huge swath of the economy - nepotism is not a dirty word here, it’s how you get things done)…,” he writes.
Of course, the trouble with perceptions is that by definition they’re subjective. What’s absurd to one person is quite reasonable to another. If you’ve grown up in a society where your government is “basically run by one family”, you may not necessarily perceive that as a form of corruption. Consequently, when someone asks you questions about corruption in your country, there’s a good chance you’ll perceive your country to be less corrupt than an outsider might do.
The CPI is created from the aggregated results of 13 different surveys of resident business leaders and country experts (both resident and non-resident). Ideally, no person who took one of the surveys would have any idea as to the levels of corruption in any other country than the one they are discussing.
For instance, if you’re a Qatari looking across the border at the corruption in Saudi Arabia (ranked 50th), your perceptions of corruption in Qatar will be coloured. Either consciously or subconsciously, you will think: “Well, it’s not perfect here but it’s nowhere near as bad as it is in Saudi Arabia”. Consequently, you will be inclined to perceive Qatar as less corrupt than you might otherwise.
That’s not to say that the CPI is completely useless. Corporations, governments and civil society use the CPI as a yardstick because although it may throw up the odd anomaly, it publishes what those groups want to know in a comprehensive, comprehensible and user-friendly manner. It also helps that the CPI is created and (very well) publicised by the world’s largest anti-corruption organisation.
The other governance indices tend to be too narrow, such as TI’s Bribe Payers Index, too sector specific, such as the Open Budget Index or too limited, such as the Global Integrity Index. The World Bank’s extensive Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) would probably be more widely used but for the fact that the results are poorly displayed and the WGI themselves are not well publicised.
The above shows that however nebulous the rankings may be, it is possible to rank countries based on corruption. But is it possible to actually measure corruption, to give it a figure that people can understand and relate to? The World Bank estimates that the annual total of bribes paid worldwide is between $1trillion and $1.6 trillion. Firstly, $600 billion is a pretty significant range and shows how difficult it is to measure corruption. Bear in mind also, that those World Bank figures relate only to bribes and don’t take into account other forms of corruption, such as nepotism or embezzlement. Can one even measure nepotism? It makes one realise that perhaps a ranking based on perceptions of corruption is not as ridiculous as it first seems.
The fact that $1 trillion to $1.6 trillion of bribes are paid worldwide doesn’t mean anything to a company that is considering investing in a Central Asian Republic where it has never invested before and has little knowledge of business practice. If you’re trying to quantify risk, you want specificity, you want the ability to compare and contrast and you want to be able to look at historical findings. For better or worse, the CPI permits that.
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