Corruption Measurements: Caught Between Conceptualizing the Phenomenon and Promoting New Governance Agenda?
The work ‘Corruption Measurements: Caught Between Conceptualizing the Phenomenon and Promoting New Governance Agenda?’ is a qualitative study based on reviewing the literature available on the subject. It starts with the introduction that explains the evolution of the idea of measuring corruption, its relevance to governance and associated theoretical issues. The topic, ‘Evolution of Corruption Measurements’ gives an overview about different corruption indices. While the topic ‘Challenges to Corruption Measurements’ briefly introduces the challenges faced by corruption measurements, the topics ‘Conceptualizing Corruption’ and ‘Methodological Issues’ give insight into the contentions faced by corruption measurements from different theoretical perspectives. Also, explained in these sections are how the corruption measurements have conceptualized corruption over the period of three decades; and how do they keep evolving their methods in order to become more relevant in policy advocacy. Issues associated with data aggregation also are explained in-depth in this work. This work demonstrates that though continuous methodological evolution and empirical research have helped corruption measurements to improve their acceptance level, the gap that exist between corruption control framework and practice will remain a challenge to address in future if corruption measurements do not genuinely account the contextual realities.