Abstract
Disclosure of income, assets and conflicts of interest can serve as powerful public accountability tools to draw attention to the abuse of public office, help prosecute corrupt offenders and create a culture of scrutiny in the public sector that deters corruption. Based on data of the World Bank’s Public Accountability Mechanisms initiative, we present the first indicator that captures a country’s financial disclosure in-law effort. By employing different panel data model specifications, we use this indicator to measure how the introduction of comprehensive financial disclosure systems impacted national corruption levels for 91 countries between 1996 and 2012. We present robust results that provide tentative evidence for a positive and significant relationship between a country’s capacity to control for corruption and the expansion of financial disclosure legislation for the years following the enactment.
Highlights
It came as a shock for the Vietnamese anticorruption community when, in 2014, the former government chief inspector Tran Van Truyen, once a leading figure in the national fight against corruption, was prosecuted for abusing his office to personally enrich himself and his family
To make a contribution to closing the evidence gap and to answer the question of whether financial disclosure (FD) systems can serve as instruments to decrease national corruption levels, this paper introduces the first index that captures a country’s FD in-law effort
It is important to note that despite the robust results we obtained in our model specifications, we are not making a claim for a causal relationship between an increase in FD in-law efforts and an increase in Control of Corruption (COC)
Summary
It came as a shock for the Vietnamese anticorruption community when, in 2014, the former government chief inspector Tran Van Truyen, once a leading figure in the national fight against corruption, was prosecuted for abusing his office to personally enrich himself and his family. In order to address these shortcomings and advance the body of research around the attempts to make anticorruption policies measurable, while scrutinising their true effect on corruption, we constructed an indicator that captures a country’s FD in-law effort For this purpose, we drew on the WB’s Public Accountability Mechanism (PAM) data, which represents the most comprehensive collection of cross-country information on constitutional requirements, laws and codes of ethics regulating financial disclosure for public officials. This finding shows how these two components of an FD system may meet more political resistance against their enactment, presumably due to their stronger anticorruption effect by allowing better scrutiny of public officials while making credible prosecution threats and increasing accountability towards the public. This finding confirms the multifaceted and rather complex nature of COC and shows how corruption is explained by many other determinants
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