"When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be."
Lord Kelvin

Publications

EU Funds’ Curse? The Impact of EU Funds on Institutionalised Grand Corruption in CEE

Presentations, Publications

 

October 28, 2014

 

Mihály Fazekas presented CRCB’s research at the launch event for the second ANTICORRP volume, The Anticorruption Frontline, at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin.

The presentation focused on the main findings of the chapter co-authored by CRCB researchers István Jánost Tóth and Mihály Fazekas. In addition, it also presented new research perspectives, including the author’s work using EU-wide public procurement data as well as the exciting new research grant they recently won, called read more

Are EU Funds a Corruption Risk?

Chapters and articles, Publications

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

Corruption Risk of the Nuclear Power Plant Development in Paks

Presentations, Publications,

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 estimate of the corruption risks associated with the proposed investment and put forward suggestions for an anti-corruption strategy. One of the key arguments in the study is that as investment read more

Second-generation indicators of high-level corruption using public procurement data

Presentations, Publications

June 4, 2014

 

Brown Bag presentation given at the World Bank, Washington D.C., 4th of June 2014

 

ABSTRACT

 

As part of CRCB’s one-week visit to the World Bank (Operations Risk, Public Sector Governance and Integrity, and Controllers), Mihály Fazekas and István János Tóth gave a brown-bag lunch presentation. It introduced the CRCB approach to measuring corruption and collusion risks in public procurement worldwide. After demonstrating the feasibility and validity of read more

Do Hungarian municipalities abide by the law? Analysis of urban municipalities’ webpages

Publications, Reports

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

New Indicators of High-Level Corruption using Government Contracting Data: Examples from Eastern Europe

Presentations, Publications

 

June 20, 2014

 

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 read more

Print media expenditure of government institutions and state-owned companies in Hungary, 2003-2012

Publications, Reports

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

In Respectable Society: On How Elite Configuration Influences Patterns of State Capture in Hungary

Presentations, Publications

 

April 3, 2014

 

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, to demonstrate how a novel analytical framework for gauging state capture works using the example of Hungary during 2009-2012; second, to systematically analyse how captor group organisation influences the read more

Needle in a Haystack – The “Educatio Error”: Problems in Connection With It and Their Solutions

Publications, Reports

 

March 29, 2014

 

Some information published 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 cases, the original, incorrect announcement is read more

Extracting data from public procurement documents 1998-2004

Publications, Reports

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