"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

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

Presentations, Publications

 

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

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

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

Needle in a haystack – The “Educatio error”, problems in connection with it and their solutions

Publications, Reports

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

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

Analysis of the procurement documents interconnectivity 2005-2012

Publications, Reports

The Hungarian Public Procurement Authority does not have such a database on Hungarian public procurements, that contains the documentation of each public procurement tender in a uniform structure: namely the call for tenders, the contract award notices, the contract fulfilment, and contract amendment notices or corrigenda.

The goal of CRBC is to solve this deficiency: we would like to build a uniformly structured database based on the publicly available documents of the Authority that is suitable read more

The Quality of Hungarian Legistlation 1990-2012. Preliminary Results

Publications, Reports

This short paper describes some basic characteristics of the Hungarian legislation in 1998-2012 through publicly accessible online administrative data. Our focus is to compare the 2010-2012 period to former years. We assume that these characteristics – the number of days elapsed between submitting a bill and the publication of the final law; the type of the person/organisation who submitted the bill; number of modifications that become necessary a short time after the publication of the law – can read more

Three indicators of institutionalised grand corruption using administrative data

Presentations, Publications

Corruption Research Center Budapest team wins the U4 Proxy Challenge competition for measuring corruption

On the 4th of February 2014, the CRCB team, István János Tóth and Mihály Fazekas, participated at the Proxy Challenge workshop in Bergen (Norway) organised by the U4-Anti-Corruption Resource Centre. In a competition with 4 other finalist teams, CRCB has won this global competition for proposing novel corruption measures with its innovative indicators of institutionalised grand corruption in public procurement. The evaluation panel included, among others, Phil Mason from DFID and Jesper Johnson from U4. We are thankful for the support and help we received read more