Frequently Asked Questions

Global Integrity is an independent information provider dedicated to educating the public. We are not a lobbying organization. While we hope that both national and international organizations utilize our data and reporting in their efforts to promote better governance, we do not engage in any overt lobbying efforts.  

 

Beginning in 2010, Global Integrity made a conscientious decision to cease publishing the annual Global Integrity Index, which aggregated our country data from the annual Global Integrity Report into a single country-by-country ranking.  Why the change?  First, as we have reduced our scope of national coverage in the past two cycles of data gathering to focus an increasing amount of effort and resources on our Local Integrity Initiative projects, the utility and attractiveness of a country ranking has waned given the limited coverage of roughly 35 countries each year beginning in 2009. Second, the decision to cease publishing the Index was a conscious attempt to reinforce a key belief that we have come to embrace after many years of carrying out this kind of fieldwork: indices rarely change things.  Publishing an index is terrific for the publishing organization in that it drives media coverage, headlines, and controversy.   They are very effective public relations tools.  But a single number for a country stacked up against other countries has not proven, in our experience, to be an effective policymaking or advocacy tool. Country rankings are too blunt and generalized to be “actionable” and inform real rebate and policy choices. 

 

Not at all; in fact, the Global Integrity Index was just a small (though highly visible) component of the annual Global Integrity Report, a collection of country assessments that combine qualitative journalistic reporting with quantitative data gathering. The Report assesses good governance/anti-corruption mechanisms at the national-level in a diverse mix of countries around the world each year, and the data that is gathered in each country as part of that fieldwork was previously aggregated to produce the annual Global Integrity Index. We also carry out extensive fieldwork at the sub-national level in countries as well as on-the-ground engagement with local stakeholders and governments.

 

We target our work at five primary audiences: government policymakers (particularly donor governments and aid recipient governments) seeking to design evidence-based reform programs; grassroots advocates that want to focus their efforts when calling for reform; journalists seeking insight into where corruption is more or less likely to occur in a country; researchers and academics interested in exploring the relationship between anti-corruption safeguards and other variables; and businesses (especially investors focused on emerging markets) seeking to assess risk and opportunity.

 

The CPI and World Bank indicators are based largely on opinion polls (in the case of the Bank's indicators, a mix of opinion polls and expert assessments, including Global Integrity's country assessments). Unlike these indices, Global Integrity data are based on original, empirical on-the-ground research, backed by peer-reviewed commentary and references. We hire local experts on corruption and governance issues to carry out original research for every country we cover. We do not base our scores on pre-existing third-party data or assessments, as do aggregate tools such as the Corruptions Perceptions Index or the World Bank indicators.

 

We view our data as complementary to other work, including the various surveys and polls produced by Transparency International; the World Bank's Worldwide Governance Indicators; various political risk assessments; and sector-specific assessments such as the Open Budget Index and Revenue Watch Index. We hope that users grasp the need to combine multiple sources of both quantitative and qualitative resources when analyzing governance and corruption issues, which are inherently complex, opaque, and difficult to generalize across countries. While we believe that Global Integrity data add value by uniquely assessing anti-corruption safeguards in a quantitative manner, we do not view them as a substitute for other indices or the only resource worth using.

 

Since 2004, the Global Integrity Report has covered more than 100 countries around the world. The scope of our coverage is constrained by the resources at our disposal, both financial as well as the availability of well-qualified researchers, journalists, and peer reviewers. In a given year, countries are included or excluded from our study based largely on these constraints. Our goal is to aim for increasingly comprehensive coverage of countries without sacrificing the quality of our work.

 

Selecting our field staff for various projects is a crucially important decision. In-country teams of experts are recruited from a variety of professional backgrounds. Lead researchers are typically based in leading local non-governmental organizations, universities, research institutes, and foundations, although some are independent research consultants. Lead journalists are often reporters and editors at major daily print publications, though some work for radio and television media. Most peer reviewers are journalists, academic researchers, or development consultants.

 

The actual fieldwork is not terribly long; it generally takes 8 to 12 weeks for our experts in the field to prepare the raw Reporter's Notebook and Integrity Indicators scorecard. The peer review process and final editing and scoring adjustments constitute another eight weeks, approximately. Overall, 6 months is a conservative approximation. This rapid turnaround is possible due to our heavy reliance on the Indaba fieldwork platform.

 

The annual Global Integrity Report is a massive and growing collection of work that typically grows by more than 1.5 million words of text and more than 15,000 peer-reviewed data points each year. To print out the entire report would require more than 5,000 pages. As such, it is impossible to publish all of the composite country assessments as a useable single volume, though individual country reports are available for printing (at around 200 pages each) off of our website.