Sameh Fawzy tells a grisly story of how cozy relationships between business and politics threatened to infect — literally — the people of Egypt. Egypt: Bad Blood By Sameh Fawzy In January of 2007, an employee of the Egyptian Ministry of Health, Sohier El Sharkawi, claimed to have found 200,000 contaminated bags used to package…
Joel Kurtzman & Glenn Yago refresh Mr. Kurtzman’s ranking of regulatory efficiency, first published in 2001 by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Kurtzman is now working from the Milken Institute, an economic think tank. Opacity Index 2007-2008: Measuring Global Business Risk Via email: Dear Friends, Two weeks ago, Glenn Yago and I released the 2007-2008 Opacity Index at the…
Disclosure: the World Bank is a funder of Global Integrity. Freedom of information (FOI) laws are a good thing, but it’s difficult to tell how well they work (see this ongoing project that aims meerly to catalog the FOI evaluation work being done). But the World Bank’s Doing Business project is poised to make a…
Pakistan’s Minister of Information announces a phone hotline to encourage information sharing between government and journalists. While not a radical step, this a welcome warming sign in a country that banned the broadcast of information “against the armed forces and judiciary” under its previous government. Minister Sherry Rehman says those days are over. Daily Times:…
The Vanguard newspaper in Lagos highlights a discouraging trend of Nigerian lawmakers declaring greater personal assets than they currently posses in order to build in a cushion that accounts for corrupt gains while in office. When those asset disclosures are finally reviewed years later, the inflated numbers sadly match reality. The article mentions how the…
A new paper analyzes the performance of the African Peer Review Mechanism, as experienced in Kenya. From the NED email newsletter: In a recent position paper on the current political crisis in Kenya, Bronwen Manby, Senior Programme Advisor with AfriMap at the Open Society Institute, discusses what can be learned from both the successes and…