Uncovering High-Level Corruption: Cross-National Objective Corruption Risk Indicators Using Public Procurement Data

Measuring high-level corruption is subject to extensive scholarly and policy interest, which has achieved moderate progress in the last decade. This article develops two objective proxy measures of high-level corruption in public procurement: single bidding in competitive markets and a composite sco...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inBritish journal of political science Vol. 50; no. 1; pp. 155 - 164
Main Authors Fazekas, Mihály, Kocsis, Gábor
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Cambridge Cambridge University Press 01.01.2020
Subjects
Attitude surveys
Bids
Competition
Corruption
Data
Economic growth
Government contracts
Government purchasing
Hypothesis testing
International organizations
Investigations
Markets
Perceptions
Political science
Proxies
Public officials
Purchasing
Tendering
Norway
Malta
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Summary:Measuring high-level corruption is subject to extensive scholarly and policy interest, which has achieved moderate progress in the last decade. This article develops two objective proxy measures of high-level corruption in public procurement: single bidding in competitive markets and a composite score of tendering ‘red flags’. Using official government data on 2.8 million contracts in twenty-eight European countries in 2009–14, we directly operationalize a common definition of corruption: unjustified restriction of access to public contracts to favour a selected bidder. Corruption indicators are calculated at the contract level, but produce aggregate indices consistent with well-established country-level indicators, and are also validated by micro-level tests. Data are published at http://digiwhist.eu/resources/data/ .
ISSN:0007-1234
1469-2112
DOI:10.1017/S0007123417000461