Is European Union still the least corrupt continent in the world? A tale of indicators


Professor Alina Mungiu-Pippidi , Hertie School of Governance

Using as a premiere both subjective and objective indicators of state capture and government favoritism and comparing them, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi and her co-author Roberto Martinez find that most Europeans, ordinary citizens and businesspeople like have lost faith in government and business integrity. Only a few countries still have majorities believing the continent is still the realm of meritocracy in public and private sector. Perceptions and objective indicators validate one another to complete a picture of distrustful Europeans, and offer insight on where a strategy could begin to prevent populists from taking advantage of this discontent.



About the speaker

Professor Alina Mungiu-Pippidi chairs the European Research Centre for Anticorruption and State-Building (ERCAS) at Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, where she teaches democratization and comparative public policy. She was the principal investigator of a 2015 EU Dutch Presidency  report on trust and public integrity in EU-28 and the designer and co-principal investigator of the 10 million euro ANTICORRP, a FP7 research project on anticorruption policy and of  DIGIWHIST, a Horizon 20-20 project on transparency of public procurement and accountability in the European Union.

Her corruption theory was published in various journal articles, most notably as ‘Becoming Denmark: How Societies Build Control of Corruption’ (Social Research, 2014) and ‘Corruption: Good Governance Needed to Power Innovation’ (Nature, 2015) and at greater length in a 2015 Cambridge University Press book A Quest for Good Governance and the Edward Elgar edited volume Transitions to Good Governance (with Michael Johnston).

For many years she has been the leader of the civil society anticorruption coalitions in Romania and her good governance collective action designs were replicated in the Balkans, Ukraine and Latin America.  Her governance work is cited and applied by a string of development organizations for which she consults occasionally, such as the World Bank, UNDP, NORAD, DFID, OECD, but also by some EU governments and the European Commission. She designed several good governance assessment methodologies, most notably one to evaluate integrity in public universities published in Times Higher Education Supplement.



Venue: 0.16-0.17

Date: 01 February 2018

Time: 12:00 - 13:00  CEST


UNU-MERIT