‘Red Flags of Corruption’ in World Bank Projects : An Analysis of Infrastructure Contracts
"Red flags" are indicators of potential issues regarding governance failure, collusion or corruption in projects. While some specific red flags can be powerful indicators of issues to be addressed, the hypothesis of this paper is that man...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Policy Research Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2012
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/main?menuPK=64187510&pagePK=64193027&piPK=64187937&theSitePK=523679&menuPK=64187510&searchMenuPK=64187283&siteName=WDS&entityID=000158349_20100322093911 http://hdl.handle.net/10986/3731 |
| Summary: | "Red flags" are indicators of
potential issues regarding governance failure, collusion or
corruption in projects. While some specific red flags can be
powerful indicators of issues to be addressed, the
hypothesis of this paper is that many proposed red flags are
potentially too ubiquitous and randomly distributed to be
useful as indicators of significant governance failure. The
paper examines project documentation from a small sample of
World Bank water and sanitation projects in an attempt to
collect data on the presence or absence of 13 commonly
accepted red flags. This paper finds that: (i) almost every
contract reviewed raised at least one of 13 red flags
analyzed; (ii) potentially tainted contracts did not exhibit
notably more red flags than control contracts; and (iii) the
occurrence of multiple red flags in the same contract was
rare enough to suggest that joint occurrence was largely by
chance, not as a result of a strongly causal
inter-relationship between flags. The ubiquity and apparent
randomness of these red flags suggests that their roll-out
as a monitoring tool requires additional thought as to
interpretation, context and use. The paper examines an
alternate tool for uncovering potential problem projects --
supplier concentration. Across a very small sample, there
does appear to be a relationship between such concentration
and potential problem projects. |
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