5

MCC, which uses "World Bank/Brookings WGI" as their yardstick for corruption, rates Bangladesh substantially worse than India and Pakistan in that respect. E.g. for FY2024, Bangladesh gets "10%" while Pakistan gets 65% and India respectively 63% "control of corruption" score.

Why is Bangladesh rated as so much more corrupt than its neighbor (India) and the [other] country (Pakistan) with which it shared a signficant history with?

Improve this question
5
  • 1
    Are you asking about how the World Bank calculate the index (your question is about the world bank) Or are you asking about why Bangladesh is corrupt (your question is about Bangladesh)
    – James K
    Commented Aug 17 at 10:48
  • @JamesK: the former, or more precisely why is there such a big diff between Bangladesh and India/Pak scores. E.g. an explanation along these lines, but in terms relevant to corruption, of course.
    – 264 champagne bottles on ice
    Commented Aug 17 at 10:54
  • 3
    I see, so like that Q&A, you are interested in the methodology that has been used to measure "control of corruption" rather than the political history of Bangladesh
    – James K
    Commented Aug 17 at 11:17
  • 1
    It might be enlightening to consider the official policy that led to Sheikh Hasina's downfall: reserved government jobs for the boys.
    – Italian Philosopher
    Commented Aug 17 at 14:50
  • 1
    @ItalianPhilosophers4Monica: might be shocking to you, but official discrimination by law doesn't count as corruption in most indices. I bet South Africa ranked well [on corruption] back in the days of Apartheid.
    – 264 champagne bottles on ice
    Commented Aug 17 at 15:26

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
5

The World Governance Indices (WGI) are based on surveys done by a variety of governmental organisations and NGOs. As such they reflect the perception of corruption that people (citizens, entrepreneurs, academics) have. There are lots of such surveys. And they essentially consist of simply asking people "Have you experienced corruption of government officials?" or "Have you paid a bribe in the last 12 months."

There are advantages and disadvantages to the survey method of measuring corruption, for example, beliefs, biases and stereotypes can feed into the results, and then become treated as "fact". On the other hand, measuring the perception of corruption can provide data when the actual objective values are impossible to obtain. It's not possible to find out from official sources, how much money was corruptly diverted since corruption is not legal. Often "perception of crime" correlates better with the actual effect of crime, than official figures on the number of people convicted.

So the reason that Bangladesh gets a lower score for corruption than India is because that is how people who deal with Bangladesh and India describe the two countries. People with dealings in South Asia say that Bangladesh is worse than India or Pakistan.

The function of the World Bank is to aggregate these data from multiple sources. There are about 14 different sources that feed into the calculation of a countries corruption index.

See https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/worldwide-governance-indicators/documentation#1

Improve this answer
10
  • TBH, I'm not entirely sure that most of the sources they use are like what you describe in the 1st para. They give a sources table at the end of this paper papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1682130 but it's hardly clear which of those provide a measure of [control of] corruption (as opposed to the other 5 indicators), or how they go about assessing it. I'd rate the WGI methodology as rather intransparent, despite the length of that paper.
    – 264 champagne bottles on ice
    Commented Aug 17 at 12:21
  • 1
    What is the point that you want to prove? That the world bank is some how utterly biased in favour of India and Pakistan, and it's all a "Western" conspiracy to denegrate Bangladesh, and that the economists have literally nothing better to do than to spend their time making up statistics for the whole globe for the sole purpose of insulting your country.
    – James K
    Commented Aug 17 at 20:16
  • 1
    I'm not trying to prove any point. I just looked at a couple of the sources that WGI cites [after I read your answer], and I was actually expecting they'd concur in an obvious fashion, but I was actually surprised by what I found. Maybe there are a crapton of [the other ~12] sources that they use for CC which agree with WGI's ordering but luck of the draw has it that I didn't check those yet. And Bangladesh is hardly 'my' country.
    – 264 champagne bottles on ice
    Commented Aug 17 at 23:42
  • 1
    [The same goes for India and Pakistan. IDK what's up with some of you users, there was another who was sure I was Indian by origin, which is also not the case.]
    – 264 champagne bottles on ice
    Commented Aug 17 at 23:49
  • 1
    "First, the literature highlights a number of measurement problems with respect to the WGI data, which include definitional issues, exclusive reliance on perceptions, biases in expert assessments, correlated perception errors, and question of comparability across countries. These measurement errors make the data inadequate for capturing the nuances of the growth–governance nexus." adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/31234/ewp-388.pdf So it seems economists are busy with 'conspiracy theories' that each others' work might be crap sometimes. Dismal science and all that...
    – 264 champagne bottles on ice
    Commented Aug 18 at 0:02
1

The Sheikh Hasina regime institutionalized corruption in Bangladesh. She gave hall passes to her party members, loyal beurocrats, loyal law enforcement officers, and loyal armed forces personnel to engage in free-style corruption, embezzlement, and money laundering.

It was similar to Mubutu Sese Seko's Zire.

For example, Sheikh Hasina, on record and on live television, boasted that her office clerk made BDT 4 billion while working in her office.

She and her family members were involved in large scale corruption, like embezzling $5 billion from the Ruppur nuclear electricity plant project.

She was also involved in hacking the dollar reserves in the reserve bank of Bangladesh.

She left Bangladesh with $156 billion in debt.

Note: Please do not delete the news screenshots because Bangladeshi newspapers often remove stories because of pressure from the governments or the political affiliations of the media houses.

Improve this answer
1
  • You may be on to something as the CC score went from 50% in 2021 to 10% in 2022. So it was a fairly drastic downgrade, in a fairly short period of time. Still, I'm interested in the exact maths of that downgrade rather than guess as to what may have prompted it.
    – 264 champagne bottles on ice
    Commented Aug 26 at 0:57

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .