Bayesian Corruption Indicator

The 2018 BCI index The Bayesian Corruption Index is a composite index of the perceived overall level of corruption. Corruption: With corruption, we refer to the “abuse of public power for private gain." Perceived corruption: Given the hidden nature of corruption, direct measures are hard to come by or inherently flawed (e.g. the number of corruption convictions). Instead, we amalgamate the opinions on the level of corruption from the country’s inhabitants, companies operating there, NGOs, and officials working both in governmental and supra-governmental organizations. Composite: It combines the information from 17 different surveys and 110 different survey questions that cover the perceived level of corruption. It is an alternative to the other well-known indicators of corruption perception: the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) published by Transparency International and the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) published by the World Bank. Methodologically, it is most closely related to the latter as the methodology used in the construction of the BCI can be seen as an augmented version of the Worldwide Governance Indicators’ methodology. The augmentation allows an increase in the coverage. In contrast to the WGI or CPI, the underlying source data are entered without any ex-ante imputations, averaging or other manipulations. This results in an index representing the underlying data, unbiased by the composer’s modelling choices. The latest version of the index is the 2023 version. It covers 221 countries from 1984 to 2021. For replicatability's sake, the older index versions are also made available. The 2014 version of the index is available for 219 countries from 1984 to 2014 The 2018 version of the index is available for 219 countries from 1984 to 2017 Please cite as: Samuel Standaert (2015) "Divining the Level of Corruption: a Bayesian State Space Approach", Journal of Comparative Economics, 43 (3) 782-803. DOI: 10.1016/j.jce.2014.05.007