Abstract
Over the past two decades, there has been significant progress in the development of indices that are used to measure the quality of governance, including important dimensions such as corruption and transparency. This chapter looks at the indicators most commonly used by development practitioners, such as Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) and the World Governance Indicators (WGIs), as well as some of the more recent indices. It reviews the purposes that such indicators typically serve and the conceptual and methodological challenges that surround their use. It discusses their historical evolution and the ways in which such indicators should (and should not) be used. The chapter concludes by noting that, while there are inherent constraints on the degree of precision that can be expected from such indices, more traditional approaches, such as the CPI and the WGIs, provide a rough and cost-effective first approximation that can be used to assess the severity of problems. Newer second-generation analytical tools, such as the Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA) assessments, can provide more nuanced and granular information about specific government functions. Taken together, these indices provide practitioners with a useful platform on which to begin developing reform action plans—with the understanding that specific programmes will always need to be highly contextual and tailored to specific political and bureaucratic environments to be effective.
This chapter was prepared by Robert P. Beschel Jr. in the context of a workshop sponsored by the European University Institute and the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, Workshop on Global Governance by Indicators: Measuring Corruption and Corruption Indices, which took place in Florence in October 2013. It has been revised and updated to reflect subsequent developments. The views within it are those of the author and do not represent the World Bank and its affiliates.
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Notes
- 1.
TI changed its methodology in that year to facilitate improved inter-temporal comparisons, with the understanding that changes after 2012 could not be compared with scores from previous years.
- 2.
Charron also notes that perception indicators, in spite of showing strong validity (at least within the sample of European states considered in his analysis), are best used as ordinal measures to compare how states or regions rank relative to one another rather than being used as hard “benchmarks” to assess actual levels of corruption.
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Beschel, R.P. (2018). Measuring Governance: Revisiting the Uses of Corruption and Transparency Indicators. In: Malito, D., Umbach, G., Bhuta, N. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Indicators in Global Governance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62707-6_7
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