Two articles from the December 23 New York Times merit a bit of unpacking. The articles — one on Ghana’s upcoming elections, the other on the rise of Islamic movements in Jordan — tout two widely-held but rarely proven theories of corruption: that corruption inhibits growth, and that corruption is a motivator for radical, Islamic…
For election monitoring in Europe, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) provides the fairest assessment, at least in the eyes of the West, as they chronicle the many flaws in Eastern European elections. But the former-Soviet bloc does its own election monitoring, and their results… well, they can’t seem to find any…
Whistle-blowing website Wikileaks has made it their trade to host content censored online. While this brings to mind China or Myanmar, their most challenging threats have come from the West — in this case, they’ve posted a series of stories quietly scrubbed from the archives of British papers by a hyperactive British libel law. The…
The European engineering giant settles a massive bribery case, pays US$1.6 billion in fines, and somehow manages to stay off US government blacklists, which (in theory) prohibit giving contracts to companies who pay bribes. Daniel Kaufmann has an analysis of the echoing hollowness of Seimens’s previous CSR commitments. Kaufmann writes: “The case of Siemens illustrates…
The Madoff Ponzi scheme fraud (covered here and here) is already claiming victims, including the JEHT Foundation in New York. While not overly active in anti-corruption funding per se, JEHT was part of a family of like-minded, progressive foundations that operated in this space. Scary stuff. Here is the text of JEHT President Bob Crane’s…
Global Integrity’s managing director reflects on Dr. Daniel Kaufmann’s retirement and call to action on issues of state capture and grand corruption. In short: we enthusiastically agree that patronage networks, political financing and high level abuse of power are the most urgent governance challenges, but differ somewhat with Dani on how to usefully tackle the…