3 EXPLOITING NATIONAL GOVERNMENT
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for assessing an index. However, a consensus among evaluators is not proof of validity; this would require independent evidence of corruption. Credibility provides an alternative criterion for evaluation. An index labelling Scandinavian countries as having much less corruption than Russia and Nigeria is more credible than armchair critics saying we don’t know enough to estimate how the scale of corruption differs between countries. A variety of corruption measures are now in circulation (see Heywood 2015). The CPI of Transparency International and the World Bank’s Control of Corruption Index (CCI) have global coverage, thereby permitting comparisons between high-income and low-income countries across cultures and continents. The most widely used measure of corruption is the Transparency International Index. A Google search shows the CPI has three times the results of the World Bank Index. The Corruption Perceptions Index. Transparency International launched the CPI in 1995 to assess corruption in national governments around the world. It was based on the research of a young econometrician then at the University of Göttingen, Dr. Johann Graf Lambsdorff (2007: 20–26, 236–255). While the CPI assigns a single numerical score to a country, in recognition of uncertainties about the reliability and validity of any single source of evidence, the CPI uses multiple sources with different ways of making up its composite rating of a country. It combines up to a dozen quantitative assessments of corruption from a multiplicity of sources that cover many countries. These include the African Development Bank, the Bertelsmann Foundation, the Economist Intelligence Unit, Freedom House, the Political and Economic Risk Consultancy, the World Bank and the World Economic Forum. Transparency International publishes details of the sources it draws upon and the methods it uses to create its index (www.transparency.org/cpi). The assessments that CPI sources make are based on the perceptions of corruption held by people who have knowledge and sometimes experience of how a national government deals with capital-intensive projects. They include a mixture of national citizens and expatriates working on national projects potentially vulnerable to demands for bribes by public officials. To complement any potential bias this group may have, the Index also receives inputs from non-resident experts who tend to favour universalistic standards. Notwithstanding differences in perspectives, the assessments of domestic and foreign experts tend to correlate highly with each other (Lambsdorff 2007: 23). To avoid conflating the views of experts with the mass public, Transparency International does not
