Don‰’t Always Trust the Numbers

CCAS Post-doctoral Fellow Hannes Baumann explains why he thinks international monitors of corruption failed to identify what was really happening in Ben Ali’s Tunisia. CCAS Post-doctoral Fellow Hannes Baumann explains why he thinks international monitors of corruption failed to identify what was really happening in Ben Ali’s Tunisia. Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index in 2013 shows Tunisia as less corrupt than its neighbors but still in need of improvement. (Note that the lightest countries indicate the least amount of corruption while the darkest suggest the most.) Interview by Steven Gertz On February 19, 2014, CCAS Post-doctoral Fellow Hannes Baumann presented his latest research, which he titled “The Mood of Capital Corruption Perception in Ben Ali’s Tunisia.” CCAS interviewed Dr. Baumann about his research, and what the public—and especially investors—can learn about evaluating corruption in countries like Tunisia. As you have focused past research on the Lebanese economy and the Hariri family, can you talk about how you became interested in the subject of Tunisian corruption under Zine El Abidine Ben Ali? I was teaching a course in the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London on political economy when the uprising against Ben Ali occurred in 2011. Until then, the common wisdom among pundits had been that Tunisia was a well-run economy relatively free from corruption. However, this image, which was carefully crafted by the regime itself, came crashing down as the Arab Spring developed and the pictures of the luxury villas of Ben Ali’s cronies went viral around the world. This made me wonder how the international community could have so readily accepted the regime’s portrayal of itself and not identified its rampant corruption. This led me to examine the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) published by Transparency International (TI) in Berlin, an index that is widely viewed as one of the most accurate instruments by which we can measure how corrupt a nation is. What I found there was enlightening. Because of the way the index is put together, European and American experts are typically aware of certain forms of corruption but may be blind to others. Tunisia scored quite well in the CPI until 2005. After that the country score declined, but the CPI still underestimated the level of corruption. In 2011, the first year after Ben Ali’s fall, Tunisia’s score plunged. A key point in your argument in explaining how Transparency International’s CPI misgauged the extent of corruption in Ben Ali’s Tunisia is that at least some of the data measured by the CPI was itself corrupted. Can you describe how this occurred? TI aggregates the CPI by examining a lot of different surveys done by groups like the Economist Intelligence Unit based in London or the World Bank in Washington, DC, and they then rank countries based upon those studies. So the sources TI cites must be reliable. Some of TI’s information came from the World Economic Forum (WEF), headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, and it appears that the data may have been manipulated by the regime. The WEF outsources the surveys they do to business associations in countries they are polling, and in Tunisia the association they relied on for their polling was close to the regime. So when businesses were receiving a questionnaire from a regime-friendly business association, we can imagine how this influenced their answers. Do you think the WEF was aware that its data might have been compromised? I have not actually had a chance to dialogue with analysts at the WEF yet, so they may be able to provide a different explanation for why they scored Ben Ali’s Tunisia so highly. However, I do not think they did know, because after Ben Ali’s regime fell, the WEF stopped publishing data on Tunisia for one year. Had the WEF known, I doubt it would have published the data in the first place. Another important aspect of this was that most of the surveys being used by TI were handled by private-sector consultancies assessing corruption for international investors. At least until 2005, the regime was not targeting foreign investors as vigorously as it was local businesses, so foreigners would not have encountered the corruption that by then was widespread in Tunisia itself. What applications do you think your research could potentially have? There is a lot of interest among consumers of this data, especially among policy makers, investors, and academics. The CPI is useful for raising awareness about corruption as a policy issue, but it does not necessarily reflect the level of corruption accurately, nor does it tell us much about the types of corruption prevalent in a country. For instance, are we analyzing “grand” corruption at the level of the government or petty corruption among lowly officials? Is the regime extorting from foreign investors or domestic businesses? Is corruption for self-enrichment or to finance the political party in power? All of these different forms of corruption have different political and economic effects. Investors and policymakers need to go to experts knowledgeable about the country (academics, businesspeople, and diplomats) who have inside knowledge and can critically evaluate data like that published by TI. Qualitative research, then, is just as important as quantitative approaches when determining the level and forms of corruption rampant in a country.