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'Red flags of corruption'in world bank projects : an analysis of infrastructure contracts

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  • Kenny, Charles
  • Musatova, Maria

Abstract

"Red flags"are indicators of potential issues regarding governance failure, collusion or corruption in projects. While some specific red flags can be powerful indicators of issues to be addressed, the hypothesis of this paper is that many proposed red flags are potentially too ubiquitous and randomly distributed to be useful as indicators of significant governance failure. The paper examines project documentation from a small sample of World Bank water and sanitation projects in an attempt to collect data on the presence or absence of 13 commonly accepted red flags. This paper finds that: (i) almost every contract reviewed raised at least one of 13 red flags analyzed; (ii) potentially tainted contracts did not exhibit notably more red flags than control contracts; and (iii) the occurrence of multiple red flags in the same contract was rare enough to suggest that joint occurrence was largely by chance, not as a result of a strongly causal inter-relationship between flags. The ubiquity and apparent randomness of these red flags suggests that their roll-out as a monitoring tool requires additional thought as to interpretation, context and use. The paper examines an alternate tool for uncovering potential problem projects -- supplier concentration. Across a very small sample, there does appear to be a relationship between such concentration and potential problem projects.

Suggested Citation

  • Kenny, Charles & Musatova, Maria, 2010. "'Red flags of corruption'in world bank projects : an analysis of infrastructure contracts," Policy Research Working Paper Series 5243, The World Bank.
  • Handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:5243
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    Blog mentions

    As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:
    1. Shocked! Scandal-Driven Management Is No Way to Address Corruption
      by Bill Savedoff in Global Development: Views from the Center on 2014-01-13 23:21:42

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    Cited by:

    1. Bernard GAUTHIER & Frédéric LESNÉ, 2018. "Reported Corruption vs. Experience of Corruption in Public Procurement Contracts," Working Papers P242, FERDI.
    2. Francesco Decarolis & Cristina Giorgiantonio, 2020. "Corruption red flags in public procurement: new evidence from Italian calls for tenders," Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) 544, Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area.
    3. Mihály Fazekas & Lawrence Peter King, 2019. "Perils of development funding? The tale of EU Funds and grand corruption in Central and Eastern Europe," Regulation & Governance, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 13(3), pages 405-430, September.
    4. Dávid-Barrett, Elizabeth & Fazekas, Mihály, 2020. "Anti-corruption in aid-funded procurement: Is corruption reduced or merely displaced?," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 132(C).
    5. Charalampos Bratsas & Evangelos Chondrokostas & Kleanthis Koupidis & Ioannis Antoniou, 2021. "The Use of National Strategic Reference Framework Data in Knowledge Graphs and Data Mining to Identify Red Flags," Data, MDPI, vol. 6(1), pages 1-20, January.
    6. Antonio Estache, 2014. "Infrastructure and Corruption: a Brief Survey," Working Papers ECARES ECARES 2014-37, ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Post Conflict Reconstruction; Debt Markets; Government Procurement; Investment and Investment Climate; Literature&Folklore;
    All these keywords.

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