Alina Mungiu-Pippidi Books

This volume on Government Favouritism in Europe reunites the fieldwork of 2014-2015 in the ANTICORRP project. It is entirely based on objective indicators and offers both quantitative and qualitative assessments of the linkage between political corruption and organised crime using statistics on spending, procurement contract data and judicial data. The methodology used in the analysis of particularism of public resource distribution is applicable to any other country where procurement data can be made available and opens the door to a better understanding and control of both systemic corruption and political finance.

What if a policymaker charged with crafting a peace arrangement in an ethnic conflict situation would ask an academic what practical wisdom can theory of ethnic conflict and nationalism offer in support? Can a bridge be thrown between the world of academia, suffocated with political correctness and driven by the empty intellectual ambition of system-paradigms, and the world of those who have to craft policies of interethnic peace and cooperation with little knowledge of theory, scarce time to order proper research, and limited resources of money to invest? This book tries to analyze in this context what the postcommunist experience of ethnic revival and conflict has in common with other nationalisms and nation-related conflicts of our world, and what, if anything, is special about it; what the best practices are of managing different ethnic conflicts within a state or in neighboring states; and what institutions work and under what circumstances? The introductory chapter includes the only theoretical discussion, sketching briefly the basics recent research on nationalism and ethnic conflict with relevance for policymaking. The next three chapters look at the political economy of ethnic Vladimir Gligorov's chapter analyzes the system on incentives which pulled Yugoslavian Republics apart, and the one now in place trying to bring them together again; Charles King looks at the small separatist Republics of the post-Soviet world to understand why some of them were more successful than legitimate Soviet successors in building states and running economies; and Gerald Knause and his collaborators use a case study from Macedonia to highlight the difficulty of two ethnic groups sharing equitably the state and public sector. The primordial-type hypotheses of ethnic social capital and ancient hatreds are tested in the chapter by Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, which analyzes public opinion surveys on nationalism and ethnic cohabitation in Kosovo, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Hungary. A critical analysis of political institutions which try to prevent and then contain ethnic conflict is provided by Valerie Bunce and Philip Roeder on ethnofederalism, from former Yugoslavia to the former Soviet Empire; by Florian Bieber on power-sharing arrangements, and by Mathjis Bogaaards on voting systems, both on the Balkans. The book concludes with a review of policy options by the editors.

Corruption has an impact. It is about time that anticorruption starts having an impact, too. This is the first annual policy report of the European Seventh Framework Research Project ANTICORRP, which has started in 2012 and will continue until 2018. Based on the work of 21 different research centers and universities gathering original data, ANTICORRP offers yearly updates on the latest from corruption research, analyzing both the consequences of corruption and the impact of policies attempting to curb it. This first report offers a methodology to evaluate corruption risk and quality of government at country, region and sector level by means of corruption indicators that are sensitive to change and policy intervention. The aim of the project is to offer testable, easy to handle policies which reduce corruption risk. Corruption distorts market competition, bolsters deficits on behalf of discretionary spending, hurts real investment in public health and education, reduces tax collection, detriments the absorption rate of EU funds, and generates vulnerable employment and brain drain. This study estimates that if EU member states would all manage to control corruption at the Danish level, tax collection in Europe would increase by 323 billion Euro per year – double of the EU budget for 2013.