corruption

Hidden barriers to open competition: Using text mining to uncover corrupt restrictions to competition in public procurement

Katona, Eszter & Fazekas, Mihály (2024). Hidden barriers to open competition: Using text mining to uncover corrupt restrictions to competition in public procurement. GTI-WP/2024:01, Budapest: Government Transparency Institute

Public procurement accounts for one third of government spending across the world, while it is also particularly vulnerable to corruption. Large amounts of open administrative data enabled a rich literature on measuring corruption. However, scholarship largely focuses on structured information on government tenders, neglecting text fields which are particularly suitable for hiding …

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Bulgaria Public Finance Review 2023

Desislava Nikolova,  Collette Mari Wheeler,  Brian Erard, Monica Robayo,  Maynor Cabrera, Evan Harold Blecher, Mihaly Fazekas, Bence Tóth, Zdravko Veljanov, Viktoriia Poltoratskaia, et al. (2023) World Bank. 2023. Bulgaria Public Finance Review 2023. Washington, DC: World Bank

Bulgaria has traditionally adhered to fiscal discipline and prudent fiscal policy since the introduction of its currency board arrangement in mid-1997. After a gradual decline in the 2000s, public debt has remained among the lowest in the European Union (EU), hovering in a …

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Governance Risk Assessment System (GRAS): Advanced Data Analytics for Detecting Fraud, Corruption, and Collusion in Public Expenditures

Ortega Nieto, D., Fazekas, M., Vaz Mondo, B., Tóth, B., Braem Velasco, R. A. (2023). Governance Risk Assessment System (GRAS): Advanced Data Analytics for Detecting Fraud, Corruption, and Collusion in Public Expenditures (English). Equitable Growth, Finance and Institutions Insight. Washington, D.C.: World Bank Group.

Corruption poses a significant threat to development and has a disproportionate impact on the poor and most vulnerable. Government agencies struggle to identify fraud and corruption in public expenditures. Risk assessments usually rely on manual …

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Elections and Corruption: Incentives to Steal or Incentives to Invest?

Fazekas, M., Hellmann, O. (2023) Elections and Corruption: Incentives to Steal or Incentives to Invest?. Studies in Comparative International Development. 

By now, most political systems around the world hold regular multiparty elections of different quality and type. However, we know relatively little about the effect of elections on corruption, especially in high-discretion, public procurement contracts implementing development aid. To address this gap in the literature, we employ unmatched comparisons and matching estimators to analyze a global government contracting dataset that …

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Integrity Dividends: Procurement in the Water and Sanitation Sector in Latin America and the Caribbean

Adam, I.,  Fazekas, M., Hernandez Sanchez, A., Horn, P. and Regös, N. (2023). Integrity Dividends: Procurement in the Water and Sanitation Sector in Latin America and the Caribbean. Technical Note No 2608. Inter-American Development Bank, Washington, DC. http://dx.doi.org/10.18235/0004688

Public procurement represents a large portion of government expenditure, more so in developing economies. Inefficiencies in public expenditures thus place a heavy burden on society. The Water and Sanitation (W&S) sector is especially vulnerable to public procurement inefficiencies due to the capital-intensive …

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Bulgaria Country Economic Memorandum : A Path to High Income

Desislava Nikolova, Mihaly Fazekas, Bence Tóth, Viktoriia Poltoratskaia, Marc Schiffbauer, et al. (2023) Bulgaria; Country Economic Memorandum : A Path to High Income (English). Washington, D.C. : World Bank Group.

Bulgaria has followed sound macroeconomic policy in recent years and has weathered the Covid-19 economic crisis relatively well. The country embarked on a thorough transformation to a functioning market economy in the run-up to European Union (EU) membership in 2007 which, since 2018, has been followed by a firm course …

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Second specialised regional training for R2G4P members: Innovative tools and methodologies for tracking illicit financial flows, state capture and corruption

In order to increase the capacity of its civil society and government partners to monitor, diagnose and tackle corruption risks, the R2G4P initiative is holding its second internal three-day regional training on 18-20 May 2022 in Budapest hosted by the GTI at CEU.

While the first training was structured around the initiative’s key methodologies, the current one explores new topics and areas, such as:

  • The conceptual framework of illicit finance and offshore wealth;
  • The role of the Financial Intelligence Units
…

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Assessing Vulnerabilities to Corruption in Public Procurement and Their Price Impact

Abdou, A., Basdevant, O., Dávid-Barrett, E. and Fazekas, M. (2022). Assessing Vulnerabilities to Corruption in Public Procurement and Their Price Impact. IMF WP/2022/094.

Public procurement can be highly vulnerable to corruption. This paper outlines a methodology and results in assessing corruption risks in public procurement and their impact on relative prices, using large databases on government contracts and tenders. Our primary contribution is to analyze how price differential in public procurement contracts can be explained by corruption risk factor (aggregated …

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Designing political integrity risk indicators: a how-to guide in 11 steps

Poltoratskaya, V., Fazekas, M. and Tóth, B. (2021). Designing political integrity risk indicators: a how-to guide in 11 steps. Transparency International.

The need for the development of specific indicators of corruption – direct or indirect – has grown over the last decade. This can be attributed in part to the increasing recognition of the significant role corruption plays in adverse governance outcomes, such as poor health and environmental degradation. The demand for indicators has also emerged out of frustration with …

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The extra-legal governance of corruption: Tracing the organization of corruption in public procurement

Fazekas, M., Sberna, S., & Vannucci, A. (2021). The extra-legalgovernance of corruption: Tracing the organization of corruption in public procurement. Governance, available online: https://doi.org/10.1111/gove.12648

This article traces the organization of corruption in public procurement, by theoretically and empirically assessing the contribution of extra-legal governance organizations (EGO) to supporting it. Theoretically, we explore the governance role played by organized criminal groups in corruption networks, facilitating corrupt transactions by lowering search costs, bargaining costs, and enforcement cots. Empirically, the analysis exploits a …

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