Given the importance and challenges of measuring corruption, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the International Anti-corruption Academy (IACA), joined efforts to organize the “Global Conference on Harnessing Data to Measure Corruption”. This event, which took place from October 31 to September 1 in Vienna gathered government representatives, members of civil society, the private sector, and academia to understand the challenges and new approaches used to tackle this complex social problem. Mihály Fazekas (Associate Professor at the Department of Public Policy) and Irene Tello Arista (PhD candidate at Doctoral School of Political Science, Public Policy and International Relations) joined such an esteemed set of experts for the 2 days.
During the panel, “Research Frontiers in Corruption Measurement”, Professor Fazekas talked about some of the emerging methods and innovative approaches to corruption measurement. Given the changes in the last 5 years regarding the quantity and quality of administrative datasets available to analyze corruption risks, new areas of measurement are opening up: like the analysis of political corruption or money laundering, using information on shell companies and company ownership.
This new availability of data, combined with established areas of corruption measurement, like the analysis of public procurement data, can shed light on social and policy-relevant topics like the risk of corruption in public procurement before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. During the session, Professor Fazekas showed some of the results of the research paper that he and a CEU alumnus, Alfredo Hernández wrote on the rise of corruption risk indicators in health-related contracts and the spill-over effect of this into other procurement contracts non-related to health acquisitions.
Professor Fazekas also highlighted some of the work done at CEU by the Global Corruption Observatory in regard to the analysis of legislative data to develop novel risk indicators of corruption, like the number of emergency procedures in the legislative process or the number of modifications a law passes through until it is enacted.
One of the recurring topics during the global conference was the need for robust statistical frameworks in order to produce high-quality data to understand this multipronged and multifaceted problem. This is why one of the products of the conference was the publication of 15 principles, called the Vienna principles, intended to guide the creation and development of frameworks and methodologies to measure corruption in a more effective way.