Fazekas, M. – Chvalkovska, J. – Skuhrovec, J. – Tóth, I. J. – King, L. P.: Are EU Funds a Corruption Risk? The Impact of EU Funds on Grand Corruption in Central and Eastern Europe. In Alina Mungiu-Pippidi (ed.): The Anticorruption Frontline. The ANTICORRP Project Vol. 2., Barbara Budrich Publishers. Opladen – Berlin – Toronto. 2014. pp. 68-89.
There is an intensifying public debate about EU Structural and Cohesion Fund’s impact on government quality in recipient countries. We test read more
On 28th October 2014 Istvan Janos Toth presented CRCB’s research results on the corruption risks of the investment of Paks nuclear power plant. The study was prepared for the Energiaklub Institute.
The study examines corruption risks based on economic theory and the specific characteristics of large investment projects. We provide an estimation of the amount of corruption risks in the proposed investment and we put forward suggestions for an anti-corruption strategy. One of the key arguments discussed in the study is read more
Brown Bag presentation given at the World Bank, Washington D.C., 4th of June 2014
ABSTRACT
As part of the one week visit of CRCB to the World Bank (Operations Risk, Public Sector Governance and Integrity and Controllers), Mihály Fazekas and István János Tóth gave brown bag lunch presentation. It introduced the CRCB approach to measuring corruption and collusion risks in public procurement across the globe. After demonstrating the feasibility and validity of new ‘objecitve’ read more
The report empirically analyses information disclosure practices on 368 municipalities’ webpages in 2013 from the viewpoint of transparency, accountability, and informing citizens. The analysis is based on the laws regulating information disclosure in Hungary. The report measures the degree to which municipalities’ webpages abide by the prescriptions of these laws. The empirical results show that it is the lack of transparency and neglecting legal prescriptions which characterises urban settlements; read more
Presentation given at the Oxford Centre for the Study of Corruption and Transparency , University of Oxford, Kellogg College, 20th of June 2014.
ABSTRACT
Existing measures of corruption often suffer from bias and are too broad to guide policy or test theories. This paper proposes three new indirect indicators of high-level corruption in public procurement, using contract and organisation-level administrative data.
The first is a composite score expressing the probability of corruption occurring in public procurement tenders read more
The transparency of government funding of the media is an essential element of the freedom of expression. However, this transparency is weak in the Hungarian media. The Hungarian media relies heavily on government advertisement spending. The public advertising orders can determine the fate of a media company. This dependency can threaten the freedom of the press since the government has the means to influence media content. This report has been prepared to describe the role of state purchases in read more
Presentation at the Midwest Political Science Association 72nd Annual Conference, Chicago, Illinois, USA, 3 April 2014.
State capture and corruption are widespread phenomena in transition economies such as Hungary. This paper has a two-fold goal: first, demonstrates how a novel analytical framework for gauging state capture works using the example of Hungary during 2009-2012; second, it systematically analyses how captor group organisation influences the structure and methods of state capture. read more
Some of the information published online in the Public Procurement Bulletin (e.g. call for bids, tender results) is inaccurate. In cases when the Public Procurement Board (PPB) is informed about the error, for example by the issuer, a correction notice is published subsequently (e.g. rectification or modification) (regulations related to this are NFM 14/2010 [October 29th], and in NFM 92/2011 [December 30th]). Nevertheless, in some other cases, the original, incorrect announcement is published in read more
Although the Hungarian Public Procurement Authority has made all the information publicly available online for the public procurement tenders between 1998 and 2004, the data format is inappropriate for statistical analysis. The information is stored in basic HTML files which does not provide any interface for sorting and searching among the data. In this technical paper we describe our data extraction process which we used to turn the HTML based information into database format by extracting read more