Measuring Corruption

While identifying different categories of corruption has not been difficult for researchers, obtaining an accurate measure of the extent and seriousness of corruption in a given country remains an elusive goal.

Since it is difficult if not impossible to obtain an exact measurement of corruption, the Global Integrity Report (2011) assesses the existence and effectiveness of key national-level anticorruption mechanisms used to hold government accountable and citizen access to them. The report does not measure corruption per se. Rather than examine the “cancer” of corruption, the report investigates the “medicine” applied against it in the form of legislation, government accountability, transparency, and citizen oversight; more specifically, it calculates for each country the “implementation gap” (i.e., the difference between a country’s legal framework for good governance and anticorruption and its actual implementation or enforcement) (p. 9). The report is generated by gathering more than 300 integrity indicators for each country (p. 5).

Corruption is not easy to measure because it often occurs in secret and involves deception. According to Blackburn and Forgues-Puccio (2007, 1535), the only objective measure of corruption is the number of public officials who have actually been convicted for the offense. This measure has been used by researchers, but as criminologists and others point out, conviction rates do not necessarily reflect the volume of corruption in a community. Furthermore, as Brooks et al. (2013, 28) reminded their readers, such measurement is influenced by the resources available, the extent to which laws are enforced, the level of reportability of corruption, and finally how well law enforcement agencies succeed in convicting perpetrators. By contrast, in a country with a low tolerance for corruption, there may be high corruption reporting and/or conviction rates. “Of course, while there are no direct ways of measuring corruption accurately,” as Tanzi (1998, 576—578) emphasized, there are many indirect ways to obtain information about its prevalence in a country, namely reports on corruption from published sources; case studies of corruption in agencies like customs, taxation, police, and land registry; and questionnaire-based surveys. Brooks et al. (2013, 29) suggested the use of aggregate or composite indices (Arndt and Oman 2006) because they combine several forms of both objective and subjective indicators. Three well-known indicators are the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) published annually by Transparency International, and two indicators prepared by the World Bank, namely the World Governance Indicators (WGI) and the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS).

The CPI utilizes corruption-related data from both expert and business surveys conducted by independent and reputable institutions, including the World Bank. This composite index ranks countries in terms of the degree of perceived corruption by both public officials and politicians. The lower the rank, the lower the perceived level of corruption. In the 2014 CPI,³⁰ the countries with the least perceived corruption were Denmark, New Zealand, Finland, Sweden, and Norway, while the countries with the highest perceived level of corruption were Somalia, North Korea, Sudan, Afghanistan, and South Sudan. Given the lack of uniformity about what constitutes corruption, one could argue that it is inappropriate to rank countries since the rules of the game differ by country. This index has been criticized for several weaknesses since it utilizes surveys of the wider population that are not necessarily applicable to the business community (Brooks et al. 2013, 30). Also, people’s perception of corruption and attitudes toward it are largely influenced by how the mass media in a country choose to construct the phenomenon of corruption and which cases/practices they publicize. The index ignores state capture (Johnston 2005), and it also focuses on corruption in the public sector and ignores corruption in the private sector. However, the limitations of the CPI notwithstanding, Transparency International has been successful in consistently addressing corruption and has thus kept the issue alive worldwide. The index has also been a catalyst for reforms in countries such as Bolivia, Cameroon, and Nigeria (Brooks et al. 2013, 34).

The World Bank Institute’s WGI assesses six dimensions of governance for 215 economies: (a) voice and accountability, (b) political stability and absence of violence, (c) government effectiveness, (d) regulatory quality, (e) rule of law, and (f) control of corruption. The WGI includes several indicators that measure the extent of public power and state capture and includes more data sources than CPI, but it does not provide information about trends in global averages (Kaufmann, Kraay, and Mastruzzi 2009, 22) and it is not an annual index. Finally, the BEEPS measures private sector perspective across 20 nations of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. An obvious limitation of this indicator is the size of the survey sample and its limited country coverage. In summary, each of the corruption indices has its weaknesses, and therefore, utilizing more than one indicator would be a wise approach to take.