"When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be."
Lord Kelvin

Reports

Hungarian Municipalities Abide by the Law? Analysis of urban municipalities’ websites in Hungary – 2013-2015

18 July 2016

This report analyses information disclosure practices on 368 Hungarian municipalities’ websites from 2015 and it compares the results with the ones from 2013 with the following focus points:  transparency, accountability, and informing citizens. The analysis is based on the laws regulating information disclosure in Hungary. The report measures the degree to which municipalities’ websites abide by the legal requirements. Transparency and openness are among the most important indices that are read more

Transparency and Responsibility. Content analysis of town websites from four European countries – 2015

5 July 2016
In this paper the CRCB analyses – as part of a pilot research project – 92 City Council websites of four European countries (Great-Britain, France, Germany and Hungary) using content analysis. We are trying to explore two questions: to what extent transparency is present (i) and how the principle of responsibility appear on the local government websites (ii)? The data collection took place between September and November 2015.

The transparency of the operation of the local governments and the read more

Corruption Risks and the New Public Procurement Act in Hungary. The CRCB Working Group’s Assessement on the Act CXLIII of 2015 on Public Procurement.

26 May 2016

In this report the legal and procurement working group of CRCB reviews the new Hungarian Public Procurement Act (CXLIII. Act 2015) which came into effect in October 2015. The analysis focuses on four areas: the preparation process of the bill (i); the expected impacts of this new act on the transparency of public procurement, (ii) competitive intensity (iii) and corruption risks (iv).

The results show that public consultancy had a minor role in the preparatory process of the bill; read more

Competitive Intensity and Corruption Risks. Statistical Analysis of Hungarian Public Procurement – 2009-2015. Data and Descriptive Statistics

3 March 2016 / 18 May 2016

The report examines data from Hungarian public procurement between 2009-2015. The data from 127,776 contracts and 135,300 awardees were used for the analysis. The data were downloaded from the website of the Hungarian Public Procurement Authority (http://www.kozbeszerzes.hu/). The Public Procurement Bulletin available online interface was used for data collection, and after data clarification procedures, the data were structured into a database. The data of analysed public tenders are downloadable from the website managed by CRCB read more

Impact Assessments, Public Consultation and Legislation in Hungary

This research explores important characteristics of the Hungarian legislation from 2010 through publicly accessible online administrative data. Our focus is measuring the quality of legislation, analysing its trends since 2006. The CRCB published its first analysis in July 2014 on the period of 1998-2012, which examined the quality of the Hungarian legislation. Our reports are not simple repetitions and updates. We extended and deepened our analysis in several areas. For instance, conserning the report of read more

Mapping high-level corruption risks in Spanish public procurement

Alejandro Ferrando Gamir

Abstract

High-level corruption and fraud has had an increased impact on the social and political debate in Spain, especially since the beginning of the financial crisis when several cuts in social spending were made. Greater attention is being paid to where and how the government spends its public resources. This paper explores the extent and forms of political corruption in Spanish public procurement. Its main contribution is the rich analytical discussion of read more

Corruption risks of the nuclear power plant investments: What can we expect in the case of Paks II?

In January 2014 the Hungarian Government announced that it reached an agreement with the government of Russia concerning the construction of two new reactors to replace current capacity at the Paks nuclear power plant. Paks I. is a Soviet-built plant operational since 1983-1987. It is the only nuclear power plant in the country and provides about 40% of Hungarian electricity consumption. With an estimated budget of 3-4 trillion Hungarian forint (9-13 billion euros), the project will be the single largest investment in read more

New ways to measure institutionalised grand corruption in public procurement

Fazekas M. – Tóth I. J.. (2014), New ways to measure institutionalised grand corruption in public procurement. U4 Policy Brief, October 2014 No 9, CMI-U4.

Public procurement, one of the largest areas of public spending worldwide, gives public officials wide discretion. It is therefore unsurprising that it is also one of the government functions most often vulnerable to corruption. While there have been many qualitative accounts of high-level corruption in public contracting, it is only recently that read more

Do Hungarian municipalities abide by the law? Analysis of urban municipalities’ webpages

The report empirically analyses information disclosure practices on 368 municipalities’ webpages in 2013 from the viewpoint of transparency, accountability, and informing citizens. The analysis is based on the laws regulating information disclosure in Hungary. The report measures the degree to which municipalities’ webpages abide by the prescriptions of these laws. The empirical results show that it is the lack of transparency and neglecting legal prescriptions which characterises urban settlements; read more

Print media expenditure of government institutions and state-owned companies in Hungary, 2003-2012

The transparency of government funding of the media is an essential element of the freedom of expression. However, this transparency is weak in the Hungarian media. The Hungarian media relies heavily on government advertisement spending. The public advertising orders can determine the fate of a media company. This dependency can threaten the freedom of the press since the government has the means to influence media content.  This report has been prepared to describe the role of state purchases in read more