Yesterday, we hosted Global Integrity’s Nathaniel Heller who presented the most recent results of the 2009 Global Integrity Report and gave an interesting overview of corruption measurements and their practical relevance.
Global Integrity ranks 70 countries based on the quality of their governance institutions, and there are some interesting developments in this year’s index. On the positive side, their “grand corruption watch list” lost 3 countries due to improvements over the past few years – China, Georgia, and Serbia. On the negative side, however, that same list got 6 new members – Algeria, Jordan, Liberia, Mongolia, Ukraine, and Vietnam.
One of the more interesting things that Global Integrity measures is implementation gaps, which are sufficiently large in some developing countries, illustrating that oftentimes what countries need is not necessarily new laws and regulations, but better enforcement of existing rules. For two biggest offenders in this category – Uganda and Bosnia – a large implementation gap is also linked to high levels of donor assistance. Which begs a question: “Are aid-dependent countries more likely to exhibit large implementation gaps?”
Published Date: April 07, 2010