Examples of promising practices

• Sub-national assessments: To address some of the limitations regarding business surveys noted above, the World Bank’s Doing Business survey developed sub-national indicators for 6 countries in 2009/1023. Further sub-national studies are under way in an additional 9 countries24. Increasingly, such studies are being periodically updated to measure progress over time or to expand geographic coverage. These studies point to significant differences in the speed of reform and the ease of doing business across cities in the same country25. Similarly the World Bank’s Enterprise surveys have developed sub-national business environment indicators for 105 countries26.
• Comparability: The World Bank has restructured its Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS) to make it compatible with its Enterprise surveys, allowing comparisons to be made across much of Europe, Central Asia, Africa and Latin America27. Likewise, the Bank’s Doing Business methodology uses factual information on relevant laws and regulations allowing it to make comparisons and benchmarks which are valid across countries. Doing Business has also introduced a new measure to illustrate how the regulatory environment for business has changed in absolute terms in each country over a 5 year period. Because the methodology is inexpensive and easily replicable, data can be collected in a large sample of countries28.
• The role of foreign investment in fuelling corruption: Given the increasingly globalised nature of private sector activities, a number of tools aim specifically to measure, in one form or another, the impact of foreign investment on local corruption dynamics29. TI’S TRAC2 and Promoting Revenue Transparency (PRT) studies, for example, include an assessment of the extent to which companies report on country-level operations including the transfer of funds to host governments in the form of license fees, taxes etc. Taking a different but related approach, TI’s Bribe Payers Index (BPI) and CMI’s survey on corruption in international business transactions both aim to assess the supply-side of bribery in the context of multi-national companies operating in foreign countries. The BPI, PRT and TRAC 2 also include an assessment of the role of foreign companies in influencing political processes in host countries.
• Multi-dimensional: Finally there are a small number of assessments which analyse a broad range of private sector related corruption issues to give a holistic picture of the challenges at country-level, mainly through survey-based perception data. TI Czech Republic’s survey, for example, combines an examination of the business environment with an assessment of anti-corruption (or ethics) regulations and an overview of attitudes to unethical behaviour in the private sector30. Social Weather Stations surveys, meanwhile, focus on the interaction between the public and private sectors, including: attitudes towards corruption, bribe-solicitation on specific transactions, bribe reporting, sincerity of government agencies in fighting corruption, participation of business in fighting corruption, awareness of government legislation, political patronage, media reporting on corruption, and internet use for government transactions31.

23 Colombia, Indonesia, Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan and Russia
24 Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, FYR Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Serbia, the Philippines and South Sudan
25 Doing Business Survey
26 Enterprise Surveys
27 Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS)
28 Doing Business Survey
29 Bribe Payers Index ▪ Transparency in Reporting on Anti-Corruption (TRAC) ▪ Promoting Revenue Transparency ▪ Beyond the Rhetoric. Measuring Revenue Transparency: Company Performance in the Oil and Gas Industries ▪ Corruption in International Business Transactions: The Perspective of Norwegian Firms
30 Who Benefits from What? The Two-fold Perception of Corruption in the Czech Business Sector
31 Surveys of Enterprises on Corruption (Philippines)