Legislative Procedural Scrutiny and Firm Performance

Ibrahimi, Klea; Benoît, Cyril; & Fazekas, Mihály (2026). Legislative Procedural Scrutiny and Firm Performance. GTI-WP/2026:01, Budapest: Government Transparency Institute.

How do legislative procedures shape economic outcomes and competition among firms? This paper examines whether reduced scrutiny in the lawmaking process creates unequal economic advantages within industries.

Drawing on a novel dataset linking UK legislation from 2009 to 2015 with more than 200,000 firm-year observations across 21 sectors, the study investigates four dimensions of legislative scrutiny: legislative volume, accelerated procedures, frequent …

Read More

Beyond Disclosure. The Global Usability Gap in Asset and Interest Declaration

Veljanov, Z., Fazekas, M., Klašnja, M., Tóth, B. (2026). Beyond Disclosure. The Global Usability Gap in Asset and Interest Declaration. GTI-R/2026:01, Budapest, Government Transparency Institute.

Asset and interest declarations are a widely used tool for preventing conflicts of interest and detecting unexplained or illicit enrichment among public officials. Yet their effectiveness depends on far more than whether declarations are formally required. The information disclosed must also be accessible, structured, comparable, and capable of being linked with other data. Drawing on …

Read More

Green Is Less Greedy: Competition, Corruption, and Productivity in Green Public Procurement in Bulgaria

Poltoratskaia, Viktoriia; Fazekas, Mihály; Quintero, Maria Fernanda; and Schiffbauer, Marc (2026) Green Is Less Greedy: Competition, Corruption, and Productivity in Green Public Procurement in Bulgaria. Sustainable Development.

Green Public Procurement (GPP) is promoted for environmental sustainability, but its economic effects are less studied.

This paper examines GPP’s impact on firm productivity, competition, and corruption risks in Bulgaria, a challenging context for governance. Using data from public procurement contracts (2011–2019) and firm-level panel data, we analyze the relationship between GPP participation …

Read More

Mitigating high-risk corruption in EU Member States

Persson, Anna; Worth, Mark; Fazekas, Mihaly; Adam, Isabelle; and Jeney, Petra (2026) Mitigating High-Risk Corruption in EU Member States. Publications Office of the European Union: Luxembourg.

The European Union’s new Anti-Corruption Package, adopted on 3 May 2023, is a major initiative aimed at combating corruption in its many manifestations. This action comes at a time when the knowledge, skills and experience needed to fight corruption successfully have reached a level of maturity capable of delivering meaningful, visible results. It also …

Read More

Public Procurement’s Long COVID: Emergency Responses and Shifting Corruption Risks in Europe

Fazekas, Mihály; Veljanov, Zdravko & Abdou, Aly (2026) Public Procurement’s Long COVID: Emergency Responses and Shifting Corruption Risks in Europe. Regulation and Governance.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused an unprecedented surge in spending to combat the pandemic with widespread accusations of corruption. The magnitude, drivers, and trajectory of corruption across the pandemic response remain underexplored. This paper approximates the impacts of the pandemic on public procurement corruption risks and the mechanisms underpinning their persistence and diffusion. Administrative data on all …

Read More

Learning from sanctioned government suppliers: a machine learning and network science approach to detecting fraud and corruption in Mexico

Medina-Hernández, M., Kertész, J. & Fazekas, M. (2026) Learning from sanctioned government suppliers: a machine learning and network science approach to detecting fraud and corruption in Mexico. Scientific Reports

Detecting fraud and corruption in public procurement remains a major challenge for governments worldwide. Most research to-date builds on domain-knowledge-based corruption risk indicators of individual contract-level features and some also analyses contracting network patterns. A critical barrier for supervised machine learning is the absence of confirmed non-corrupt (negative) examples, which makes …

Read More

Using Beneficial Ownership Data for Systematic Risk Assessment in Public procurement. The Example of 6 European Countries.

Tello Arista, I., Fazekas, M. & Volkotrub, A. Using Beneficial Ownership Data for Systematic Risk Assessment in Public procurement. The Example of 6 European Countries. Eur J Crim Policy Res (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10610-025-09654-9

Despite the considerable interest, there is little evidence on the suitability of beneficial ownership data for systematic corruption risk assessment. This paper aims to validate common beneficial ownership risk indicators for proxying public procurement corruption. By implication, it offers practical insights for research, policy, and investigations. It also …

Read More

Revisiting the Link between Politicians’ Salaries and Corruption.

Klasnja, Marko; Fazekas, Mihály & Al-Shaibani, Ahmed (2026) Revisiting the Link between Politicians’ Salaries and Corruption. British Journal of Political Science. 56:e20. doi:10.1017/S0007123426101392

It has long been argued that paying politicians higher salaries should help decrease corruption. However, the empirical evidence is mixed, partly due to the large variation in contexts, research designs, conceptual definitions and measures of corruption, and the predominance of case studies with potentially limited generalizability. To alleviate these challenges, we evaluate uniformly defined and validated corruption …

Read More

Methodology for estimating financial savings resulting from transparency, accountability and participation

Fazekas, Mihály; Rudinac, Ivana; and Adam, Isabelle (2026) Methodology for estimating financial savings resulting from transparency, accountability and participation. CoST Infrastructure Transparency Initiative. London.

This report presents a methodology for measuring financial savings resulting from the implementation of transparency,
accountability and participation (TAP) interventions – in public infrastructure investments. It outlines a tailored impact
evaluation methodology developed by the Government Transparency Institute (GTI) in collaboration with the CoST- the
Infrastructure Transparency Initiative International Secretariat. The framework is based on publicly …

Read More

National and regional annual aggregate statistics of public procurement spending and corruption risk indicators. A data export based on above EU threshold public tenders (2011-2025)

Government Transparency Institute (2026) National and regional annual aggregate statistics of public procurement spending and corruption risk indicators. A data export based on above EU threshold public tenders (2011-2025), Budapest: Government Transparency Institute. Version 2026/03. Link: https://www.govtransparency.eu/national-and-regional-annual-aggregated-public-procurement-data-TED-2011-2025-version-202606/

This data publication provides national and regional annual aggregate statistics on public procurement spending and corruption risk indicators across 30 European countries (EU-27, Iceland, Norway, and Switzerland) for the period 2011–2025. The statistics are derived from above EU-threshold public tenders published at Tenders …

Read More