"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

Hungarian Municipalities Abide by the Law? Analysis of urban municipalities’ websites in Hungary – 2013-2015

Publications, Reports, , , ,

18 July 2016

This report analyses information disclosure practices on 368 Hungarian municipalities’ websites from 2015 and it compares the results with the ones from 2013 with the following focus points:  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’ websites abide by the legal requirements. Transparency and openness are among the most important indices that are read more

Transparency and Responsibility. Content analysis of town websites from four European countries – 2015

Publications, Reports, , ,

5 July 2016
In this paper the CRCB analyses – as part of a pilot research project – 92 City Council websites of four European countries (Great-Britain, France, Germany and Hungary) using content analysis. We are trying to explore two questions: to what extent transparency is present (i) and how the principle of responsibility appear on the local government websites (ii)? The data collection took place between September and November 2015.

The transparency of the operation of the local governments and the read more

Corruption Risks and the New Public Procurement Act in Hungary. The CRCB Working Group’s Assessement on the Act CXLIII of 2015 on Public Procurement.

Publications, Reports

26 May 2016

In this report the legal and procurement working group of CRCB reviews the new Hungarian Public Procurement Act (CXLIII. Act 2015) which came into effect in October 2015. The analysis focuses on four areas: the preparation process of the bill (i); the expected impacts of this new act on the transparency of public procurement, (ii) competitive intensity (iii) and corruption risks (iv).

The results show that public consultancy had a minor role in the preparatory process of the bill; read more

Competitive Intensity and Corruption Risks. Statistical Analysis of Hungarian Public Procurement – 2009-2015. Data and Descriptive Statistics

Publications, Reports

3 March 2016 / 18 May 2016

The report examines data from Hungarian public procurement between 2009-2015. The data from 127,776 contracts and 135,300 awardees were used for the analysis. The data were downloaded from the website of the Hungarian Public Procurement Authority (http://www.kozbeszerzes.hu/). The Public Procurement Bulletin available online interface was used for data collection, and after data clarification procedures, the data were structured into a database. The data of analysed public tenders are downloadable from the website managed by CRCB read more

Impact Assessments, Public Consultation and Legislation in Hungary

Publications, Reports, , , ,

This research explores important characteristics of the Hungarian legislation from 2010 through publicly accessible online administrative data. Our focus is measuring the quality of legislation, analysing its trends since 2006. The CRCB published its first analysis in July 2014 on the period of 1998-2012, which examined the quality of the Hungarian legislation. Our reports are not simple repetitions and updates. We extended and deepened our analysis in several areas. For instance, conserning the report of read more

Rent Extraction and the Rule of Law. The Case of Hungarian Residence Bonds’ Law

Publications, Research Notes, , ,

 

This research note examines the history and background of the Hungarian Residence Bonds’ Law. We conclude that the residence bond legislation is an example of the violation of the rule of law, of its connection with rent-seeking, and of possible appearance of political corruption. This case is a clear manifestation of what form, what special means, and what consequences political favoritism can have and can operate with in a given read more

Integrity Pacts – Preventing Fraud in Public Procurement Through Civil Society Oversight Mechanisms

Presentations, Publications

 
Agnes Czibik presented CRCB’s research results at Transparency International Croatia’s conference ‘Integritiy Pacts – Preventing Fraud in Public Procurement Through Civil Society Oversight Mechanisms‘ in Zagreb on 10th June 2015.
The presentation gave an overview on the measurable corruption risk differences of EU-funded and nationally funded public procurement procedures and it showed some network characteristics of Hungarian organisations with high corruption read more

Data publication for workshop at Big Data for Policy conference

Databases, Presentations, Publications, , ,

 
A dataset and codes for analysis are released to support the workshop held by Mihály Fazekas at the conference: “Policy-making in the Big Data Era: Opportunities and Challenges” at the University of Cambridge on the 17th of June 2015. The data and codes are solely for demonstrating some interesting ways structured public procurement data can be used to measure favouritism in government contracting.
Presentation slides
UK government supplier data (2009-2013): Public procurement supplier level dataset, halfyearly aggregation, contracts awarded by UK central read more

No public procurement corruption in Hungary? Analysis of the decisions of the Hungarian Courts 2009-2014

Publications, Research Notes

 

This research note examines court orders issued in and after 2009 in Hungary. The aim of the analysis was to identify crimes related to corruption in public procurements in order to inspect the validity of the CRCB’s composite corruption risks indicator. A court order was examined if it met the following criteria: it was issued in 2009 or later, it was about corruption related crimes and it contained the word “közbeszerzés” (“public procurement”), “pályázat” (“tender”) or “tender” read more

How much money did Közgép Ltd win in 2013?

Publications, Research Notes

Four online portals tried to estimate in the beginning of 2014 the total amount of money that ’Közgép’ group, owned by former close friend (Lajos Simicska) of the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, won in public procurement in 2013. The four sources (Portfolio.hu, Átlátszó, K-Monitor, Hír24) calculated four different sums. There was more than half a billion Euro difference between the highest and the lowest estimates. Given that public procurement records are open to the public, it is evidently read more