Foreign assistance

In addition to providing encouraging, exerting pres-sure and evaluating progress, foreign partners and international organisations have also provided South-east Europe with considerable anticorruption assist-ance. The correspondence between their policy mes-sages and the concrete financial and technical assist-ance they provide – a correspondence mostly but not universally achieved – is of key importance to the overall impact.

Multilateral institutions provide larger amounts of funding but aid approval and disbursement goes through much cumbersome procedures which creates a time lag between need and assistance. Bilaterals, although much more flexible, have smaller funds which require more precision in what they target.

With the EU, technical assistance to SEE countries has been delivered for objectives that are also conditions to be met before further integration. Thus, both policy implications and funding are conducive to the accomplishment of reforms. In this respect, multilateral institutions differ substantially from bilateral aid agencies.

and European Partnership commitments, and by contributing to the prevention of corruption in education by improving transparency, accountability and social participation. Largely following recom-mendations from the Project Against Corruption in Albania and EURALIUS (European Assistance Mission to the Albanian Justice System) in 2012 constitutional amendments were adopted on restricting the immunities of MPs, judges and other high level officials. Following these amendments a series of cases of corrupt judges, MPs and high level officials were sent for prosecution, and some of them have resulted in final convictions.

EURALIUS was an EU funded project which brought to Albania high-level expertise to provide legal advice and raise the capacities of the Albanian Ministry of Justice and judicial institutions. EURALIUS extended its assistance to the reform of the internal procedures of the High Council of Justice; the consolidation of the new chamber of private bailiffs; the reform of the internal structure of the Office of the Ombudsman; and the capacities of legal advisors of the Constitutional Court.

figure 92. eu funding for anticorruption per capita of the population (€), 2007 – 2012

Source: Calculated from data from (European Parliament, 2013).

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figure 93. share of anticorruption funding in total eu pre-accession assistance

Source: (European Parliament, 2013).

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One of the major technical assistance programmes in Albania has been the EC funded Project Against Corruption in Albania implemented by the Council of Europe. It aimed to contribute to democracy and the rule of law through the prevention and control of corruption by enhancing the implementation of anticorruption policies and strategies in line with GRECO and MONEYVAL (Committee of Experts on the Evaluation of Anti-Money Laundering Measures and the Financing of Terrorism) recommendations

figure 94. share of anticorruption and judicial reform assistance in overall eu assistance to Croatia

Source: (European Parliament, 2013).

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The EU has invested significant resources in assisting Croatia, in its efforts to suppress corruption. Almost 1/3 of the overall contracted pre-accession funds to Croatia (approx. €110 million) in the period 2007 – 2011 were related to strengthening the administrative capacities in the country linked to the fight against corruption.

In Kosovo, two of the areas of EU assistance – rule of law and justice and home affairs – are related to anticorruption. In particular, EU’s support to anticorruption institutions has contributed to the drafting of key legislation in the National Anticorruption Framework, including laws on the Anticorruption Agency, on declaration of assets, on conflict of interest, and on political party financing and amendments to the Criminal Code.

The EU has so far provided Macedonia with assistance in the field of anticorruption both as institutional

Box 16. CIPE: a global anticorruption leader

Since the early 1990s, the Washington-based Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) has been one of the most active supporters of economic and governance reforms in the former communist countries and in Southeast Europe in particular.

CIPE addresses both the demand side and the supply side of corruption through programmes that: mobilise the private sector to raise anti-corruption standards and advocate for reforms; streamline regulations and reduce implementation gaps to limit opportunities for corruption; improve corporate governance to strengthen firm-level integrity and equip small and medium-sized enterprises to resist bribery and meet requirements of global value chains. CIPE supports collective action by business and civil society stakeholders in order to address the institutional sources of corruption. A key goal of collective action is to reduce the incentives and opportunities for corruption. CIPE’s value chain/anticorruption program seeks to incentivise mid-sized businesses to reduce corrupt practices as a means of joining global value chains.

One of the successful applications of this approach was in Bulgaria. In the mid-1990s, CIPE was among the pioneering supporters of the Bulgarian anticorruption initiative Coalition 2000, which later inspired the establishment of SELDI. Among other things, CIPE assisted the promotion of corporate governance standards, the engagement of private businesses in anticorruption efforts, and advocated for institutional reform in the privatisation process. CIPE later provided capacity building for this model to business leaders, policy makers, and anticorruption experts from the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. The emphasis was put on identifying key lessons learned from combating corruption in Southeast Europe, and how they can most effectively be applied in the Caucasus and Central Asia.

CIPE was also among the key early supporters of SELDI in the early 2000s. The Center has provided guidance on mobilising businesses to back governance reform and has assisted SELDI in the advocacy of anticorruption policies.

figure 95. eu rule of law assistance to Kosovo²⁵²

Source: (European Court of Auditors, 2012).

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strengthening and support to civil society. According to the Macedonian Central Donor Assistance Database,²⁵³

252 IPA ‘wider rule of law’ projects include, in addition to police and judicial projects, projects related to anticorruption, customs and public financial management reform.

253 http://cdad.sep.gov.mk

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the overall value of EU funded programmes in the field of good governance and anticorruption since 2008 has been was €7,395,133. However, the largest part of this sum falls on the large regional project “Fight against Organized Crime and Corruption: Strengthening the Prosecutor's Network”, worth €5,263,158 which was implemented on a regional level (Western Balkans) by a wider international consortium. Therefore, only part of the funding was aimed directly for capacity building of Macedonian Public Prosecutors Office.

Тhe overall project objective was to contribute to improved cross-border and international judicial cooperation to investigate and prosecute cross-border crime, with focus on organised crime and corruption in particular.

Only recently the EU has provided direct support for civil society organisations working on anticorruption in Macedonia. One of the priority areas in the 2012 IPA-I call for Support to Enhancement, Sustainability and Development of an Active Civil Society was the fight against corruption and organised crime. This shows that the EU has started to consider the role of the civil society in this policy area previously reserved for the government.

Anticorruption assistance by foreign partners intensi-fied after Montenegro independence. In 2007, UNDP started its anticorruption project focusing on aligning the national legal framework with UNCAC, support to the CSO initiatives and specialised governmental anticorruption agencies, as well as with anticorruption research in the areas of judiciary, local self-governance and the healthcare sector.

USAID funded Good Governance Activity (2010 – 2013) has had a pivotal role in advancing the CSO monitoring capacity with respect to the judiciary and to strengthen the role of civil society and the private sector as counterparts to institutions of government in Montenegro. US State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs has provided capacity building for judges, prosecutors and police officers; this was done in parallel to their Criminal Justice Civil Society Programme, which has been supporting the CSO monitoring initiatives in criminal justice sector.

7.3. RECoMMENDATIoNS

Given the significant role international assistance plays in the anticorruption efforts in Southeast Europe, it is imperative that its effectiveness is enhanced. To this end, it is needed:

• Foreign assistance programmes need to better reflect the findings of international and independent domestic evaluations. For this to be achieved, assistance programmes need to be made more responsive and flexible, including a shorter time lag between design and delivery.

• International anticorruption assistance to national governments should envisage a stronger role for civil society. This includes the involvement of NGOs as implementation partners, monitors and resource organisations, especially in the evaluation of the impact of assistance projects.

• The effectiveness of assistance needs to be periodically evaluated through impact assessment methods. In addition to providing a value-for-money measure – especially when there has been public funding involved – this would allow successful programmes to be sustained while unsuccessful to be discontinued. It is imperative that this assessment be independent and that it utilises the expertise of civil society organisations.

• Assistance needs to encourage cross-country pro-grammes on common issues – such as, trans-border crime. The Bulgarian experience in public-private cooperation in the analysis of the linkages of organised crime and corruption should be utilised across the region.

• The role and efforts of the Regional Anti-Corruption Initiative to develop and implement measures under the Governance Pillar of the SEE2020 Strategy in cooperation with national and regional civil society groups should be strengthened. The Initiative provides an important bridge between national governments and other stakeholders in the region, which should further be expanded.

• European Commission regular reports’ preparation and findings should be better embedded in local policy-making by drawing more heavily upon local civil society and business community.

T

he Corruption Monitoring System (CMS) was designed and developed by CSD in 1998.²⁵⁴ Introduced at a time when corruption measurement was confined to public percep-tions, the CMS launched a measure of the corrup-tion victimisacorrup-tion of individuals by public officials accounting for their direct experience with various corruption patterns. Based on CMS diagnostics, assessments could be made about the dynamics of the prevalence of corruption patterns in a society.

The CMS methodology allows comparability of data across countries and registers the actual level and trends of direct involvement in administrative corruption, as well as the public attitudes, assessments and expectations relating to corruption. CMS diagnostics have been applied in Bulgaria since 1998,²⁵⁵ in Southeast Europe in 2001, 2002 and 2014,²⁵⁶ and occasionally in Georgia and Moldova. Some CMS concepts have also been modified and included in the Eurobarometer surveys on corruption; this makes CMS data comparable to Eurobarometer data.²⁵⁷

ThEoRETICAL BACKgRouND

Most academic and policy analyses on corruption usually start with the assertion that corruption is a multifaceted phenomenon that is difficult or impossible to measure.²⁵⁸ The measurement problem of multi-facet phenomena as corruption boils down to definition and operationalisation of the underlying concept. Defining what is being measured scopes the interpretations of data and the types of conclusions that could be made.

The CMS is one of the possible measurement approach-es to corruption. Its main objective is to provide

statis-METhoDoLogICAL APPENDIx:

CoRRuPTIoN MoNIToRINg SySTEM

tical estimates of the prevalence of the most common incidents of corruption and has diagnostic and descrip-tive functions.

In the CMS context, corruption is conceptualised as a specific type of social behaviour which includes specific forms of interaction between actors, attitudes associated with these interactions and a set of perceptions which relate to the interactions (serving both as reflections of the interaction and prerequisites which define the behaviour strategy of the actors).

Corruption refers to a specific group of interactions:

the public is provided with services by government institutions, in the process of which it deals with officials who are employed by these institutions.

Corruption is described through the “principal-agent model”: members of the public (clients) interact with government institutions (principal) through officials (agents); agents act on behalf of the principal who defines their rights and obligations and entrusts them with certain discretionary power. Corruption is an interaction in which officials in government institu-tions (agents) abuse the discretionary power they have been entrusted with by these institutions (principal) in their interaction with the public (clients).

This definition has two key elements which need to be further operationalised: “abuse” and “benefit”. Both should be present for certain behaviour to be categorised as corruption. The relation between these concepts could be defined as a “form-content” relationship.

The “benefit” is the form of the transaction, while the

“abuse” refers to the content of the transaction – the type of resource that is being offered in exchange for a benefit. Varieties of corruption behaviour arise because of the variation in both form and content: of the benefits that are being supplied by clients to agents and of the types of abuse of public power are the content of the exchange. The most common word used to label the forms of corruption is “bribe.” Regarding content, variations in corruption behaviour could be numerous but they depend on what is being done, how it is done and who is the perpetrator. In more concrete terms the above variation in corruption behaviour could be summarised in four sub-concepts:

• form. Bribe is the common label of the private benefit that is being exchanged. The most common forms

254 (Center for the Study of Democracy, 1998, pp. 64-91)

255 All Corruption Assessment Reports since 1998 are available at the

“Anti-corruption” section of CSD’s webpage http://www.csd.bg

256 (SELDI, 2002).

257 (TNS Political & Social, March 2014) and (TNS Opinion & Social, February 2014).

258 Summaries of discussions in this area can be found in: (Disch, Vigeland, Sundet, Hussmann, & O’Neil, 2009); (Jain, 2001);

(Johnson & Mason, July 2013); (Reinikka & Svensson, J., 2003).

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of bribes include money, gifts or favours. The latter could be linked to types of corruption behaviour.

It is important to note that bribes are the empirical manifestation of corrupt behaviour but receive their corruption load only in conjunction with the other aspects of corruption.

• Type. Entrusted discretionary power can be abused in many different ways (trading in influence, nepotism, clientelism, etc.).

• Level. Agents at different levels could abuse discre-tionary power and this might not always be directly linked to specific clients (level).

• violation model refers to the model of abuse of discretionary power and could be split into two broad categories: 1) violation of existing laws and/or institutional norms; 2) provision of a better service.

In some societies and cultures, additional benefits provided to agents could be regarded (by custom, law, tradition, etc.) as normal behaviour when/if provided services are normal or better; in such cases additional benefits take the form of a tip and not the form of a bribe.

While the above abstract summary model of corruption behaviour could be further specified in order to list most possible variations of form and content, it is important to note that form and content could easily be used as proxies of each other. If there is a bribe, there is most probably some kind of abuse; on the other hand, if there is an abuse, there probably is some material gain. Therefore, in order to measure the prevalence of corruption behaviour, an attempt should be made to either measure the number of bribe incidents, or the number of abuses of different types. In empirical terms, the easier way to “access” corrupt behaviour is through identification of instances of bribery. Types, violation models and levels are more difficult to observe and account for. Even when the latter is the case, there is always a possibility that a violation has occurred without any personal benefit for the offender (the official).

The specific objective of the CMS is to address the most common forms of abuse. In terms of the above classification this would be low level (administrative) corruption of all types and violation models. The reason for choosing such a criterion is expected prevalence that could be registered with random sample techniques: low level (administrative) corruption of all types and violation models. The proxy of these abuses is the occurrence of bribery which is defined as benefit received informally by the agent (the public official) in the form of money, gift or favour. It is an addition

to the public services clients are entitled to, given the organisation of the public service of a country.

CMS INDICAToRS AND INDExES

The main indicators of the CMS describe corruption (as a social phenomenon) using three groups of concepts:

experience, attitudes, and perceptions.

Information on CMS indicators is collected through a survey questionnaire. Indicators are first broken down into survey questions and at the analysis stage the information is aggregated to form the CMS indexes.

This allows for a more robust interpretation of findings and has been a way to keep findings aligned to the theoretical background of the study.

Over the years, two methods of aggregation have been used by SELDI. In the 2001 – 2002 round of SELDI diagnostics, as well as in the SELDI Action Agenda,²⁵⁹ a quasi-normalisation procedure was used, which calculates individual respondent scores for each respondent and “places” scores on a scale ranging from 0 (“best value” in terms of corruption) to 10 (“worst value” in terms of corruption). In the 2013 – 2014 diagnostics, the results of which are presented in this report, a direct allocation of respondents into specific (for each indicator) categories was used. Essentially, both procedures render similar results, but have some important differences.

The advantages of the normalisation method are that all indexes use the same scale and are in this way

Corruption behaviour elements

Source: Center for the Study of Democracy/Vitosha Research.

Abuse (content) Benefit (form)

Bribe (money,

gift) Bribe

(favour) Type Violation

model Level

Other

Nepo-tism Abuse

of office Violate

law Better service High:

political Low:

Admini-strative Corruption behaviour

259 (SELDI, 2013).

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comparable in terms of values. The disadvantage of the index calculated in this way is that it is not directly interpretable. The conclusions that can be made would be based on time series and evaluation of dynamics over time. However, an index of 0.5 or 5.6 does not directly relate to the content of questions and the specific aspects of the concept it represents. Another disadvantage is that possibilities for statistical analysis of data are largely limited.

The main advantages of the direct allocation method (conditional recoding of variables that compose each indicator) are two. First, results are directly interpretable in terms of content. In this way the index is more or less

“self-explanatory” and needs little input explanations as to what is measured and presented. Second, the index variables provide all possibilities for statistical analyses and tests. A limitation in this respect is that index variables are measured on weak scales (nominal).

A comparison of results between quasi-normalisation and conditional recoding calculation methodologies is presented below for one of the most important and widely commented indexes: involvement in corruption transactions.

ExPERIENCE-BASED CoRRuPTIoN INDExES

Involvement in corruption

“Involvement in corruption” captures the instances when individuals make informal payments to public officials. The questions used to gather information about this indicator are victimisation questions and reflect experience during the preceding year. The indicator

“Involvement in corruption” captures the instances when individuals make informal payments to public officials. The questions used to gather information about this indicator are victimisation questions and reflect experience during the preceding year. The indicator

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