This space is host to public reactions to the Global Integrity Report. While comments are lightly moderated to filter out spam and flames, we encourage critical feedback and skepticism. To comment privately, you can reach Nathaniel Heller, the director of Global Integrity at info@globalintegrity.org. We do read (and usually respond to) every word of feedback we get — thanks for taking the time.
For your reference, you may want to see our methodology or important caveats.
— Jonathan Eyler-Werve
Hello. Why isn't Haiti on here?
A lot of your comments use cliches without any substantiation. You seem to believe that every time there is a coup, there must be suppression of the press. It is rare, but there ARE exceptions. You also make some sweepting statements without colloborating evidence. This is unfortunate since you have a great deal of useful data.
LITHUANIA
"…leaving whistleblowers vulnerable to punishment by both "official" and "unofficial means." Just one of the cases -> http://www.laisvaslaikrastis.lt/news/353/53/d,detalus/. There are thousands of such cases in Lithuania, people succumb to pressure, threats, emigrate if possible. There is a widely growing issue of social ranks division, political corruption…
Thanks A20! On citations, we defer to the trusty Chicago Manual of Style on these issues. It suggests:
Global Integrity, “Global Integrity Report: Angola: 2008.” Global Integrity. http://report.www.globalintegrity.org/Angola/2008 (accessed May 19, 2009).
"Green is stronger anti-corruption" — at first I thought that meant "theoretical" anti-corruption measures, but then you say it's meant to "determine how well that framework is working". In Italy (my country) for example corruption is widespread, from politics to any other public and private activity. Journalism, academia, research, the legal system, virtually everything is controlled by politicians, and the trend is worsening constantly. IMO it doesn't deserve any "green" lines in its chart.
Truly Fantastic. I’m writing a report on democratization in Ecuador and your data is invaluable. Thank You.
Although it would be helpful if you provided a link of somesort on the homepage on how to cite The Global Integrity Report as a source.
I love your site, but honestly tell you that you need more for him to monitor those who commented with your records
RE the Seychelles comment and all that:
What about Botswana and Lesotho. And Swaziland come to that.
And why are some of the countries no longer applicable, like the UK, Tanzania. . .? Bet UK is slipping.
You may have noted that TI didn’t manage to get a survey done on South Africa for their 2009 Global Corruptioon Barometer coming up soon.
Regards to LlC!
Uplifting to see all the positive comments on your work: wow
At anonymous/Greece: unfortunately we have yet to cover Greece in the Global Integrity Report. We hope to in the future. Regards, Nathaniel Heller (Global Integrity)
Frankly saying, I am so touched of your work! The report on Azerbaijan is so accurate!Very helpful for all purposes! Well done!
Dear Sir/Madam,
I urgently need the pages 147, 149, 151 from the GI 2008 Report for South Africa. These pages are corrupt or something that one can see only some cut off words on the pages. Can you please take a look at it and make those pages available? Thank you very much.
Alisher Bazarov, Cape Town, South Africa.
that is great
big up for that
Greetings
I was trying to find information about Greece, since newspapers were talking about corruption in their Government. Is there no data? or am I looking somewhere wrong?
Re: Tonga
I am quite confused about the depth of corruption being reported here. Tonga is totally corrupt, from any area of the King Ruling Government..from head to toe. Grants/loans from world bank or any other source is being diverted into their personal deep pockets and not for its intended purposes.
It appears to me that since in Argentina there is a large media monopoly, if you base your Recent Analysis on media resources from Argentina, you may come up with biased conclusions. A few days back a media regulation of monopolistic practices was approved, which favors diversity, and this is clearly a step forward in this area. There is no censorship whatsoever on the judiciary. No doubt in the last 2-3 years profound changes that promote status quo shakeup may be perceived as interference. Please, use alternative sources to traditional media to arrive to serious conclusions.
I agree with your situation report on Liberia. I know that the president of Liberia does not pay much attention to controlling corruption. The reason is simple. Most of the of culprits are her own people, descendant of free-slaves. I challenge the president not replicate the situation of the 20th century.
George: the short answer is that very aggressive anti-corruption measures were adopted by Eastern European countries joining the EU. Once EU membership is in hand, they may not last. Indeed, Romania is rolling back disclosure rules already.
See longer analysis here:
Eastern Europe Tops Anti-Corruption Rankings, While Corruption Scandals Continue
And here:
Romania Cannibalizes its Anti-Corruption Institutions
Meanwhile Canada has some work to do. Cultural norms are one thing; we look at institutional frameworks, which are not great. However, we get lots of questions about our Canada scores. As always, the source data is entirely open to scrutiny — if there's specific scores that are incorrect, we are happy to reexamine them.
See:
http://commons.www.globalintegrity.org/2008/02/canada-cash-for-access-and-not-subtle.html
http://commons.www.globalintegrity.org/2008/07/behind-scenes-of-disputed-scorecard.html
To echo others – Romania and Bulgaria get a high rating while Canada gets a moderate one. Sounds implausible and damages the credibility of all ratings. Please provide more explanation.
Cambodia,
3.5/ML souls been masacred, the remains still in exile to date. I just got back leaving without any predicament until now. Enter with wealth leaving without justice to define any morals as there is none in Cambodia. Corruption will never be demolish……….Good luckt o anyone who sees light and opportunities in Cambodia, but believe me do not ENTER….
Yours,
Tuan N. Tran
Thanks, Jimmy. I completely agree that Malaysia is a good candidate for a Global Integrity Report. As always, budget and other factors play a role. Country section is discussed in depth here:
http://commons.www.globalintegrity.org/2009/06/global-integrity-report-2009-country.html
Why is there no report on Malaysia? You would think that a country where hypocrisy regarding corruption and rampant corruption, cronyism, and human rights violations would warrant a report on integrity.
Excellent insight on why Anti-Corruption agencies in India are under performing.However another reason could be our inability to put in place local indices to measure/ track Corruption – http://www.nobribe.org/why-do-we-need-to-measure-corruption
Sanjay Uvach
Corruption Free India
No report on Malaysia?
On Malawi the sources need to be checked. It is true that there has not been a deputy in place for the ACB since years, but the director has full authority to authorise investigations and does so unlike your scorecard says. References are a bit old when referring to directorship, which yes has been changing often in recent years, but is staffed with the same person since late 2007.
Happy to discuss more. Hannes Hechler, Programme Coordinator at U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre
Good question. Discussion of country selection here:
http://commons.www.globalintegrity.org/2009/06/global-integrity-report-2009-country.html
We have published 2009 field work in Bosnia & Herzegovina, Georgia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Serbia, Ukraine as well as reporting from Norway and Germany. Fieldwork is ongoing in Slovakia.
We're on a two year cycle; odd years are heavy on the Balkans and even years are more diverse.
Very interesting, but why only these 29 countries, why nothing on any European country?
I am writing to you from Azerbaijan. I want to say we suffer from corruption. I study in Azerbaijan State Economic University. I almost fed up it because of corruption that is why I want to study abroad and I try for this all day but there has one problem in my mark. Some people get
5 by paying many to the teacher but I do not pay for pass the exam that is why my marks are not so high. But I want to make you sure that this estimating can never be really. I will have graduation work in May 2010 and my university teachers want $1000 for it There is one thing to say the universities abroad from our country pay attention especially to mark if I want to enter in and as the result of it though I have IELTS exam outcome I can not study foreign university .Foreign university must not pay attention to mark of the country like us. I would like you to help me on it.thanks
I think you have made a very big mistake. I have seen it that Serbia's overall rating is 63 of 100 and Kosovo is 67 of 100. Everybody knows that Kosovo is the center of corruption in Europe. Its the narko-state with no instituions. Its the NATO base. Its funny.:)
Very attractive from your website. I will try to learn more on this issue…
Best regards,
Well accomplished the task for 2009!
Very serious and good efforts but the data compiled is true or true &/but doctored as everything as in today's world!
Good work! When you are studying Canada 2009, financial oversight and reporting is a glaring minus sign. Attention should be paid to Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page's attempts to penetrate government secrecy on how much debt Canada has, and how the government is spending money since it took power. Certainly, at the first mention of the deteriorating world financial position, it gave $75 billlion to Canadian and American Banks.
New Zealand would be a great candidate, no question. Most of our work in the South Pacific (and we've done more than most organizations there) has been in countries with little formal research into their politics — Timor Leste, Vanuatu, Fiji, Solomon Islands. The reasons for this are discussed here: http://commons.www.globalintegrity.org/2009/08/notes-from-road-pacific-pontifications.html
. . .
Nothing on New Zealand?
Surely time for NZ to feature, considering its self-placement at the top of the Transparency International Corruptions Perceptions Index.
Contrary indicator: "Leaky House Syndrome" is a multibillion construction fraud with not one police investigation let alone prosecution.
Least corrupt in the world?
yeah. right.
. . .
Thanks for the bug report, Kirby. This has been fixed.
Hi, I noticed that your "Printer-friendly" screens for Burundi have dead links. It's because the date up top is 2008 rather than 2007. You should update the links… for anyone else trying to access the printer-friendly reports, just change it from 2008 to 2007 in the URL.
@anon Regarding surprisingly strong scores in Eastern Europe:
We asked the same perplexed questions. Our best explanation is here, in case you didn't see it:
http://commons.www.globalintegrity.org/2009/02/eastern-europe-tops-anti-corruption.html
I don't have much to add except to reemphasize that there are MANY inputs into the big system we call "governance" and we're tracking a small subset of them — public policies and institutions. History, economics, culture all play a rather large part. Organized crime, for instance, is a huge issue in Bulgaria but that isn't addressed in our Integrity Indicators.
We focus on institutions and such because they're easiest to change. It's not a complete solution, but it's a pretty good start.
Interesting approach and data – good addition to the other indexes existing out there. I am still puzzled by the great performance of the East European countries though. It is very hard to believe that e.g. Romania and Bulgaria have better (working) integrity systems than e.g. Germany, USA, or Canada – even after seeing the explanations you gave in the 2008 Global Integrity Report. It is hard to argue that the former don't actually have higher corruption than the latter – just a more active media, civil society, watchdogs etc. The fact that the reforms are new in Romania & Bulgaria, and thus not yet systematically implemented could be a potential explanation, but still: Bulgaria has a lower implementation gap than Canada! So I'm still puzzled. Are there any better explanations for this? Do you know of any analysis that tries to assess the correlation between/ impact of integrity systems (as Global Integrity has conceptualized them) on corruption?
GREAT JOB !!!
BUT HOW DO WE HAVE AN END TO THIS ONCE AND FOR ALL ??
I THINK THE ANSWER IS KRISHNA-CONCIOUSNESS ( ISKCON ) OR GOD-FEARING MENTALITY OF THE PEOPLE ! ONLY THEN IT WILL END …… FROM WITHIN OUR HEARTS !!!
We rotate the countries studied from year to year as a way of extending resources (radical change in 12 months is uncommon). While we have conducted some work in all of those countries except Austria, this was not in 2008.
You're welcome to mash up our data from previous years on your own using the published raw data, although a careful look at our methodology writeup first is recommended.
You can see our future schedule, and explanation of this here.
In looking at the index, I noticed a few exclusions – I wasn't sure why they were not included?
Brazil
Mexico
Germany
Austria
Australia
Venezuela
Apologies if this is explained somewhere – I looked for the why and couldn't find it. Thanks.
@Alternative: possibly — it depends entirely on the article.
Analysis or expansion of findings buried deep in the Global Integrity Report are encouraged. We’d also take a blog-style submission that provides a critique of widely reported facts. An original investigation requires substantial factchecking before we will publish it, and may not be possible.
You can send a pitch or submission to info@globalintegrity.org. If we haven’t worked with you before, a CV or resume is helpful as well. Thanks for your interest!
Can I publish my article about corruption on your website?
Well done! But what about my country,Albania in 2008..we still suffer corruption…:)
I love the Reporters’ Notebooks especially. The personal stories are really useful.
@ Simon — Terrific blog post on the ZA results…exactly the kind of analysis we love. Don’t hesitate to call/email if you need more information for the column. — Nathaniel Heller
Great stuff. Have a column about the report in tomorrow’s Business Day (South Africa). It’s up on my blog now (www.izwi.com).
@ Anonymous — good point. We'll have to look for ways to do that.
The ratings are as follows: 100-90 (very strong); <90-80 (strong); <80-70 (moderate); <70-60 (weak); <60 (very weak).
We try to de-emphasize the ratings because we want people to engage directly with the source material, rather than the summary ratings. "Moderate" doesn't tell you why a country scored the way it did or what governments could do differently. But the source material – the reporting and raw scores – can provide that kind of insight, which is, to me, the more important information.
@Mohammed — We expand the report coverage each year, and have not yet included Seychelles. We’ll certainly keep it in mind for the future rounds of Global Integrity Reports.
I don’t see a legend for each Category in the Integrity Indicators Scorecard. Maybe I did not find it but it would be good to have it there readily available in the same page, for each country, for the Integrity Indicators Scorecard.
Just to be clear, I am refering to the “Moderate, Weak, Very Weak” rating system. By just opening one page one cannot infer where’s the bottom and where’s the top in the scorecards. Out of common sense, I guess it goes: Excellent, Very Good, Good, Moderate, Weak, Very Weak, and maybe there is a Strongly Weak or something similar.
It would be nice to know how it goes and to see it integrated into each country’s Integrity Indicators Scorecard. Nevertheless, this is a great site!
I received the GI emails only today and I am still in the process of getting a holistic view of GI’s work for 2008. At this stage what strikes me most is the touch of perfection. And as others have said, I should say GREAT JOB!
I may add that taking a cue from the GI’s work each country should work on its own integrity report – like the human development report. The GI can flag this as one of the items for its future work.
Very interesting reports. I wonder why Seychelles does not feature in the country reports?
Best regards.
Mohammed Afif
Secretary to the Cabinet
very well done. I’m looking forward to going through some data.
Thanks!
Great job!