The fieldwork for the Global Integrity Report: 2009 is underway, and we’re happy to announce our target countries for the upcoming year. The big news this year is that we are splitting our 70 target countries into two groups, which we will alternate on even and odd years in a two-year rotation.
You can see the country coverage in the 2004 pilot and 2006-2008 reports on the Global Integrity Report site. As always suggestions and criticism from our readers are welcome.
Our new core 70 countries rotating on a biennial cycle
The Global Integrity Report: 2009 will be the first in a series of more standardized rounds of future national-level fieldwork. Starting this year, we will begin to cover a core set of 70 countries on a biennial basis, covering half the first year and the other half the next year. This means that the approximately 35 countries chosen for 2009 will be covered again in the Global Integrity Report: 2011, 2013 and so on. The even years (2010, 2012, etc) will have the same pattern of coverage with a separate list of 35. In addition to these 70 countries, we expect that each year we will also include 5-10 countries of interest in addition to the core rotating cluster.
Over the past three annual cycles, we have observed that most countries’ data stay relatively constant over a 12-month period. This reflects the reality that anti-corruption reforms can take decades before fully taking root. By allowing for a full year off between assessments, we expect that the Global Integrity Report will more usefully capture each country’s progress. These somewhat smaller biennial samples will also allow us to shift resources towards scaling up our Local Integrity Initiative efforts in parallel to ongoing Global Integrity Report fieldwork.
Countries to be covered in 2009 include:
Algeria
Armenia
Azerbaijan
Bosnia
Brazil
China
Colombia
Georgia
Germany
Ghana
India
Indonesia
Jordan
Kenya
Kosovo
Lebanon
Liberia
Macedonia
Malawi
Mexico
Mongolia
Nepal
Nicaragua
Norway
Rwanda
Serbia
Sierra Leone
South Korea
Tajikistan
Trinidad
Uganda
Ukraine
United States
Venezuela
Vietnam
Zimbabwe
How did we choose these 36 countries?
One extremely important criterion in our country selection process is the strength and availability of our in-country teams: Global Integrity’s international network of local anti-corruption experts. The Global Integrity Report is created by our in-country experts who conduct interviews, compile data, write journalistic stories, and review their respective country assessments prior to publication. These 36 countries represent places where we have strong teams that are available to work with us in 2009.
In addition, beginning in 2009 we wanted to attempt to more systematically cover a “global” sample of countries each year. As such, we looked at the regional diversity of countries, population figures, and national income levels. It would be impossible for us to precisely replicate the worldwide distribution of those criteria in our small sample. However, as part of our new two-year biannual sample of 70 countries, we have attempted to include countries that roughly match global income, geographic, and population distributions, including the top fifteen most populated nations in the world.
Countries to be covered in 2010 include:
Albania
Angola
Argentina
Bangladesh
Bolivia
Bulgaria
Cameroon
Canada
East Timor
Ecuador
Egypt
Ethiopia
Guatemala
Hungary
Italy
Japan
Kazakhstan
Kyrgyzstan
Malaysia
Moldova
Morocco
Nigeria
Pakistan
Peru
Philippines
Poland
Romania
Russia
Somalia
South Africa
Tanzania
Thailand
Turkey
West Bank and Gaza
Yemen
— Nathaniel Heller and Global Integrity
