The Congressional Research Service is a branch of the Library of Congress that provides bespoke research to Congress. With an annual budget of around US$100 million, this agency provides factual grounding to legislative debates. Their work is paid for by taxpayers and in the public domain… except that it’s mostly secret, despite failed efforts to…
Our post below references (rather critically) a Doing Business Blog post on Sunday, Feb. 8th entitled “Russia: Corruption Prevention during Financial Crisis”. While references to the post still show up in the blog’s search catalog, it’s no longer on the site. Draw your own conclusions. Thanks to the creepy magic of Google cache, here’s the…
Now the folks at Doing Business are perpetuating the flimsy theory that that Russian bribes and the price of oil might move in tandem. See our rant from last week on this, which unpacks why the underlying data is so shaky. Grr….this is especially annoying coming from the IFC, whose Doing Business survey is among…
Foreign Policy’s blog, The Cable, reports that the perpetually shafted Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor is maybe getting kicked out of the US State Department’s main building and sent across the street, cutting access to senior State officials. Office remodeling is cited as the reason, but once moved, it’ll be tough to reclaim…
Admittedly, I am not a fan of Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI) (and similar perceptions-based indices), the limitations of which are discussed at length in our book, A Users’ Guide to Measuring Corruption. I was going to rant about a very public abuse of the CPI last week, then got distracted by actual work……
On Monday, the International Budget Partnership (IBP) officially released its Open Budget Index 2008, an evaluation of the public availability of eight key documents that serve as benchmarks in national-level budget processes. In presenting the index, Warren Krafchik, IBP’s Director, emphasized that assessing budget transparency is more than an academic exercise; budgets have a direct…