Measuring Corruption in Infrastructure: Evidence from Transition and Developing Countries

This paper examines what we can say about the extent and impact of corruption in infrastructure using existing evidence. There is evidence that most perceptions measures appear to be very weak proxies for the actual extent of corruption in the infrastructure sector, largely (but inaccurately) measuring petty rather than grand corruption. Survey evidence is more reliable, but limited as a tool for differentiating countries in terms of access to infrastructure finance or appropriate policy models. The paper suggests that a focus on bribe payments as the indicator of the costs of corruption in infrastructure may be misplaced.     

Notes on Contributors

In the 1990s, several public corruption scandals were uncovered in Sweden. This article focuses specifically on local corruption, and our purpose is to examine whether a case can be made that problems of public corruption in Swedish municipalities have increased. By applying instruments from the institutional rational choice framework, we reach the conclusion that there are indeed reasons to suspect that retrenchment initiatives and organisational reforms over the last two decades, often labelled ‘new public management’, have increased the risk of corruption. Although hard empirical data do not yet exist, the suspicion that public corruption in Swedish municipalities may have become an increasing problem cannot be disregarded. Hence, we conclude by calling for further empirical research in this field.     

Public Sector Reforms: New Public Management without Marketization? The Danish Case

Is it possible to imagine New Public Management without marketization? In Denmark the present liberal-conservative Government has, throughout its 10 years in power, designed and implemented more than 15 major management reforms in the public sector. Although most of the reforms are rhetorically firmly rooted in neo-liberal ideologies they have, in practice, promoted tools and mechanisms of the “traditional,” or Old, Public Management. Based on an empirical study of the reforms, we suggest that the notion of “pragmatic” New Public Management is introduced to enhance the current understanding of New Public Management in the Western industrialized societies.     

Executive-Led Governance or Executive Power ‘Hollowed-Out’—The Political Quagmire of Hong Kong

New Zealand has long enjoyed a reputation as a country with a corruption‐free state sector. However, social change and the state sector reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, have rendered that status less secure. While hard‐core corruption does not yet appear to be a major problem, what constitutes corruption can be a function of changing public perceptions and attitudes. Four main types of behaviour of public officials are identified, all of which have a bearing on how corruption is perceived. In New Zealand, there is casual evidence that hard‐core corruption might be more common today than in the past, but the official attitude to the possibility of it increasing seems to be overly sanguine, partly as a result of a very narrow definition of corruption. Vigilance could be enhanced by a stronger role for Parliament's agency, the Office of the Controller and Auditor‐General.     

Public Accountability in Malaysia: Challenges and Critical Concerns

Despite its laudable roles in steering the process of socioeconomic development, government bureaucracy in Malaysia has not escaped public criticisms for its inefficiency, corruption, and failure to guard public interests. The media, civil society groups, intelligentsia, and the political opposition have successfully utilized the major scandals to highlight the growing public concern over the poor performance of the bureaucracy and its lack of accountability and responsiveness. This has provided impetus for the “clean and efficient government” movement initiated in the early 1980s and a series of subsequent efforts aimed at promoting appropriate values and ethics among public officials. Numerous rules and regulations have been framed, major reforms have been introduced in various spheres of administration, and an extensive program of training and bureaucratic reorientation has been undertaken. Despite all this, recent evidence suggests that the public service continues to suffer from problems of corruption and other irregularities. Obviously, the performance of numerous reforms in public service and the institutional mechanisms put in place for tackling ethical problems, though positive in general, has fallen short of expectations. This paper seeks to examine and analyze the present approach to combating corruption and promoting accountability in the Malaysian public service. In particular, it focuses on institutional mechanisms currently available and identifies and analyzes their constraints and limitations in keeping the public bureaucracy under surveillance and control.     

Informal payments for health care services – Corruption or gratitude? A study on public attitudes,perceptions and opinions in six Central and Eastern European countries

In this study we aim to compare the public perceptions towards informal patient payments in six Central and Eastern European countries (Bulgaria, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Ukraine). Overall, around 35–60% of the general public in each country has ever made informal payments, though informal cash payments are perceived negatively, mostly as corruption. In-kind gifts are often seen as a token of gratitude. However, significant differences among countries are observed. Despite the public support for the eradication of informal payments, there are population groups who favor their existence and this should be taken into account in policy-making.     

Curbing Corruption in Government Procurement in Southeast Asia: Challenges and Constraints

Corruption in the government procurement of goods, services and public works has been commonplace in Southeast Asian states (with the exception of Singapore) over many years. It has affected the provision of vital services and infrastructure and has been a key factor in undermining standards of governance. In recent years, reforms have been introduced in the region to combat corruption in the procurement process. However, to date their impact in many of the states has been at best limited. The article will consider the nature, types and extent of corruption in government procurement in the various states of Southeast Asia, following which it will discuss the reforms that have been introduced to address the problem. The article will then assess the limited impact of the reforms, and discuss the two reasons for this. The first reason was that the reforms were not sufficiently comprehensive and precise in tackling the entire spectrum of corruption in procurement and in creating the necessary legal powers for watchdog and enforcement bodies when dealing with such practices. Second, there were serious weaknesses in the implementation of these reforms, especially in translating legal provisions into everyday practice. Of particular importance are the limited capacity and status of watchdog and enforcement bodies, and the extent to which they are also compromised through corruption. The conclusion will consider the lessons to be learnt in tackling procurement corruption from the experience of the states of Southeast Asia and the challenges they face in pursuing further reform in the future.     

New Public Management in Austria: Local Variation on a Global Theme?

This article tracks public sector reform in Austria with a focus on the influence of New Public Management (NPM) both as label and as specific set of reform ideas. We analyse to what degree current reforms have been influenced and shaped by this widely acclaimed international trend. In this empirical study we combine the different data sources of media coverage, reform documents and public sector executive survey to cover different levels of analysis. Although the reforms include NPM-features, we see no evidence so far for an archetype change in the Austrian public sector.     

THE ENTERPRISE FORMULA,NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT AND THE ITALIAN HEALTH CARE SYSTEM: REMEDY OR CONTAGION?

Health care services represent an extraordinary experimental ground for introducing wider political and institutional transformations of the state. The adoption of entrepreneurialism into European health care systems has strengthened technocratic decision making over traditional mechanisms of political control. In Italy, in the midst of a severe legitimacy crisis affecting the administrative and political systems at the beginning of the 1990s, New Public Management ideas seemed ‘the’ remedy against the pathological politicization of distributive politics. Much hope has been placed since in a new and ascending group of general managers, entrusted with the ambitious mission of running health care services more efficiently and with the unenviable expectation of resuscitating public trust in welfare institutions. By analysing the 1992 Amato government’s landmark health care reform in its substantive changes, this paper explores the last decade’s main reform trajectories of Italian health care reforms that irreversibly transformed its institutional arrangements and organizational structure, namely the enterprise formula and the regionalization of the health care sector. The paper suggests that the political turmoil of 1992–94 served as catalyst for radical policy change and argues that the single most important explanation for the enactment of New Public Management‐type reforms rests in a new executive reinterpretation of its legislative prerogatives and function.     

Effects of Out-of-Pocket Payments on Access to Maternal Health Services in Almaty,Kazakhstan: A Qualitative Study

The current study addresses health care reform in transitional countries and explores the impact of out-of-pocket payments on access to maternal health services drawing on Kazakhstan's case. Data on out-of-pocket payments and access to maternity care were generated through qualitative in-depth interviews conducted in Almaty during the period 2009–2010. The results indicate that while health sector reform was designed to improve the quality of care and equity, the introduction of official user charges accompanied by a rapid growth of informal payments created financial barriers that prevented women from accessing maternal services leading to reduction in utilisation of maternity care.     

Rectification at three: Impact on the Cuban economy

Since 1986, Cuba has been engaged in a national effort to redirect its polity and economy; this effort, spearheaded by President Castro, is generally known as the “rectification” campaign. Although occurring at roughly the same time as reforms in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the Cuban process—which emphasizes dismantling market-oriented mechanisms and enhancing economic centralization—differs radically from the others. An impressionistic assessment of the economic effects of rectification after its first three years (focusing on the behavior of macroeconomic indicators and of the construction sector) suggests that rectification has not turned the Cuban economy around. Moreover, it is questionable that rectification could do so in the medium term, considering the reforms that are taking place in Cuba's main trading partners, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Jorge F. Pérez-López is an international economist with the Bureau of International Labor Affairs, U.S. Department of Labor. This article presents only his personal views. He has written on different aspects of the Cuban economy, including economic growth, the sugar industry, international trade and energy balances. His book,Measuring Cuban Economic Performance, was published by the University of Texas Press in 1987.     

The birth of corruption and the politics of anti-corruption in Albania, 1991–2005

This paper analyzes the transformation of the signifier “corruption” in the Albanian public sphere during the period 1991–2005 from a discourse analysis approach. The aim is not to trace corruption in its presence and consequences, but to show how different articulations of corruption supported different agendas. More specifically, this paper aims to show how the corruption discourse that dominated Albanian public discussion during the period 1998–2005 served to legitimize a neoliberal order by articulating corruption as inherent to the public sector and to state intervention in the economy. This meant that corruption could be eliminated through neoliberal policies such as privatization and deregulation. Through a discourse analysis of corruption it is possible to politicize the concept of corruption instead of reducing it to a static and inherent feature of Albanian culture and society.     

President Gloria Macapagal‐Arroyo's anti‐corruption strategy in the Philippines an evaluation

Fighting corruption has been one of the priority issues for President Gloria Macapagal‐Arroyo for the past five years. Faster‐paced and result‐oriented implementation of anti‐corruption projects did bring some tangible results. There are new laws and executive and administrative orders related to anti‐corruption which have been passed. New strategies during her second term such as strengthening anti‐corruption agencies, more social value formation at the national level, and the use of e‐procurement in the government system, show encouraging signs for success. However, despite the effort and achievement, the public perception of corruption and sincerity of the government performance in fighting corruption remains unchanged or has even worsened. Is it due to lack of political will? Does this mean that the government is losing the war on corruption? The answers are complex, but two important reasons are the slow progress to improve the country's economy and the ineffectiveness of the government which has resulted in a negative public perception. The government needs to gain more public confidence so that the anti‐corruption reforms will strengthen good governance and make it accountable.     

The neoliberal discourse on corruption as a means of consent building: reflections from post-crisis Turkey

This article draws attention to the ideological role that the neoliberal discourse on corruption has fulfilled in the promotion of the second generation reforms in Southern countries since the 1997 East Asian financial crisis. This discourse is ahistoric insofar as it fails to recognise corruption as a problem of modernity; biased insofar as it associates corruption with Southern countries' historical and cultural specificities only; contradictory in terms of its counter-productive anti-corruption strategies; and politicised as it has redefined ‘corruption’ as ‘rent-seeking’. In the absence of alternative radical conceptualisations, this essentially competition-induced neoliberal orthodoxy on corruption has been easily articulated within morality-based popular concerns in domestic politics and hence acquired a hegemonic capability. The article substantiates these arguments by examining the trajectory of the neoliberal anti-corruption agenda in Turkey with a particular focus on the developments of the post-2001 financial crisis period.     

Natural Resources,Development Strategies,and Lower Caste Empowerment in India’s Mineral Belt: Bihar and Odisha During the 1990s

Despite having equally vast endowments of natural resources and similar socioeconomic profiles, the Indian states of Bihar and Odisha pursued markedly different development strategies during India’s first decade of economic liberalization. Whereas Bihar turned away from its natural resource sector and adopted policies of social empowerment, Odisha courted private investment in extractive industries and aggressively pursued market reforms. To account for this divergence, we argue that the social composition of political power in each state directly shaped the strategies that leaders embraced towards the natural resource sector and overall development. This paper makes contributions to the writings on natural resources and the political economy of India. We show that the presence of abundant natural resources does not necessarily result in a predictable pathway of sectoral and economic policy outcomes. Instead, social factors can be a powerful determinant of how resource-rich states approach their economies.     

Change leadership and change embeddedness in public organizations: Connecting macrolevel reform to microlevel implementation

Governments initiate major public sector reforms for various reasons. Although change leadership appears crucial, its role in implementing reforms in public organizations receives scant attention. Insights from public administration and change management literature help to bridge the gap between these macrolevel and microlevel perspectives. Our multilevel study of two youth care organizations addressing public sector reform explores how leadership behavior—and in interaction between top and middle managers—contributes to the concept of what we call change embeddedness among front-line employees. The use of leadership behaviors during the reform that are leader centric (shaping) appear to be associated with greater ambiguity and worse change embeddedness. However, leadership focused on engaging employees and boundary spanning with external organizations seems to support the embeddedness of the reform, especially when these behaviors are connected to a clear sense of purpose around the change.     

CHOICE AND EQUALITY: ARE VULNERABLE CITIZENS WORSE OFF AFTER LIBERALIZATION REFORMS?

In recent decades, we have witnessed a massive restructuring of public service delivery mechanisms, including service liberalization reforms, the pursuit of the choice agenda, and the creation of quasi‐markets. A central aim of these reforms was that citizens should receive better value for money through greater competition among service providers. However, it is debated whether all layers of society are equally able to benefit from these developments. We assess the equality in citizens' choice behaviour with regard to liberalized services of general interest across 25 countries of the European Union. Our findings show that the gap between less and better educated service users, in terms of actual switching behaviour, widens once a considerable degree of service liberalization, as evidenced by the number of service providers, has been achieved. However, this has been found only in the mobile telephony sector and not in the less competitive market of fixed telephony services.     

STATE REGULATORY CAPACITY: EXPERIENCES FROM PUBLIC SECTOR REFORMS IN NORWAY

State regulatory capacity is being threatened by internationalization, commercialization and persistent demand for public services. The article addresses the overarching question of how the state is changing due to recent public sector reforms. By studying changes in the regulation of the health care sector and the food sector in Norway, the article challenges the assumption that recent public sector reforms have necessarily led to a decline of the central state's regulatory strength. The conclusions are that the central state level has in fact been strengthened by regulatory reforms, by transferring authority to the state level and by enhancing the central administration's co‐ordinating and regulating capacity.     

Money matters: The role of public sector wages in corruption prevention

Economic theory as well as conventional wisdom from corruption-ridden countries suggest that low wages among public employees lead to corruption, but cross-sectional empirical research has largely failed to confirm this relationship. In this article, we investigate the relationship between experiences of corruption and wage levels for public sector employees, utilizing both objective and expert survey data, with global coverage. The statistical analysis shows that higher wages, as compared to the average wage in the country, is associated with less corruption. There is also some support, but weaker, for the hypothesis that corruption increases when wages fall below subsistence levels.     

Higher Education in Transition to a Market Economy: Two Case Studies

THE IDEA FOR THIS ARTICLE came from a visit to Tomsk that took place in May 1997. The authors visited the State University of Tomsk, one of Russia's leading universities, with an enviable research record and very good library and computing facilities, and were fortunate enough to be able to interview senior staff of the university concerning their budgets and financial situation. Apparently the situation in Tomsk is not especially bad; indeed it may well be rather better than elsewhere in Russia. In order to have a little basis for comparison and to provide a second case study, we also investigated some aspects of the financial arrangements at the Economics Faculty of Moscow State University. What we learned from these two cases-admittedly far from a representative sample-not only revealed a great deal about the current state of higher education reforms in Russia but also provided a snapshot of the state of Russian economic reforms in general. Hence although this article is partly about Tomsk and Moscow, it is also about these wider issues. In significant respects, Russia remains quite distant from a well-functioning market-type economy, and some of these respects are important for the higher education sector. In a very fundamental sense, one could identify the main source of Russian shortcomings in reforms as a general problem of the state.1 However, this is not the place for a general review of such a major topic. Instead, in this article we focus on a few aspects of Russia's reforms in so far as they affect higher education, namely (1) ownership, property rights and governance issues; (2) funding issues and the state budget; (3) the tax regime and (4) non-functioning of the market economy. In what follows, therefore, we proceed as follows. First we outline some general issues relevant for the reform of a system of higher education moving away from former, Soviet-type structures, focusing on the Russian situation; then we present the case studies of Tomsk and Moscow. The following section examines issues concerning higher education in particular and the reform process more generally, as highlighted in the two case studies and in the light of the above four issues. We end with a short concluding section.