The Changing Faces of Europeanisation: How Did the European Union Influence Corruption in Slovakia Before and After Accession?

Beblavý, Miroslav; Sičáková-Beblavá, Emília

doi:10.1080/09668136.2014.899767

Cited by 15 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…These narratives in CEE confirm many of the earlier insights from the literature dealing with cohesion policy and corruption (e.g, Beblavy and Sičáková -Beblavá 2014;Surubaru 2016;Fazekas and Tóth 2016). To the extent that focus group participants' views can be considered as general opinion, there seems to be agreement that the development assistance provided by the EU is a good thing, but also that it is a magnet for schemes to convert public resources into private assets, or simply waste the money that 'needs to be spent', much of it through rigged public procurement processes.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 83%

“…For instance, mayors' party affiliations shaped opportunities for pork-barrel politics using EU funds in Hungary (Papp 2019). Beblavy and Sičáková -Beblavá (2014) found that 'Structural Funds gradually became a symbol of corruption in the distribution of government subsidies' in Slovakia. Selection processes of EU funded projects were a hotbed of clientelism and direct political influence, for instance in the form of allocating contracts to 'opportunity networks' in Romania and Bulgaria (Surubaru 2016).…”

Section: Cohesion Policy Corruption and Popular Perceptionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A free lunch from the EU? Public perceptions of corruption in cohesion policy expenditure in post-communist EU member states

Batory

2020

Journal of European Integration

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Under the EU's cohesion policy, post-communist member states in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) are amongst the largest recipients of European Structural and Investment (ESI) Funds. This article focuses on popular narratives of corruption and abuse in the allocation of the funds in the 'new' member states. Specifically, it aims to investigate how citizens perceive and evaluate the origins and motivations of the EU for providing the funds, the abuse affecting these resources, and who they blame for the misuse, relying on focus group discussions in Hungary, Romania and Slovenia. Popular narratives indicate that citizens perceive cohesion policy implementation as intertwined with grand corruption. While national political elites are considered as the main culprit, EU institutions are also seen as failing in their duties. These findings are significant because perceived EU inaction against grand corruption undermines notions of European solidarity and damages the EU's credibility and legitimacy.

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 83%

Section: Cohesion Policy Corruption and Popular Perceptionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A free lunch from the EU? Public perceptions of corruption in cohesion policy expenditure in post-communist EU member states

Batory

2020

Journal of European Integration

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“…Despite the unique features of EU Funds that would imply they have sharply different impacts from national funds, there has been remarkably little scientific work on the question to date (Mendrinou ; Beblavy & Sičáková‐Beblavá ). There are, however, two bodies of literature that speak to this issue: the broad social science literature on aid dependence and the Europeanization literature in political science.…”

Section: Conceptual Framementioning

confidence: 99%

Perils of development funding? The tale of EU Funds and grand corruption in Central and Eastern Europe

Fazekas

King

2018

Regulation & Governance

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Given the unprecedented scale of intergovernmental development funding and the importance of institutional quality for human well-being, it is imperative to precisely understand the impact of development funds on corruption. In Europe, European Union (EU) Funds provide a boost to public spending in recipient member states while introducing additional corruption controls. We investigate whether EU Funds increase high-level corruption in the Czech Republic and Hungary in 2009-2012. We analyze newly collected data from over 100,000 public procurement contracts to develop objective corruption risk indicators and link them to agency level data in the public sector. Propensity score matching estimations suggest that EU funds increase corruption risk by up to 34 percent. The negative effects are largely attributable to overly formalistic compliance and EU Funds overriding domestic accountability mechanisms in public organizations entirely dependent on external funds. The policy implications are profound: governments should reduce barriers to market entry by lowering red tape and prevent excessive concentration of funds.

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“…In spite of the considerable public and policy interest in corruption and risks in EU Funds spending, citizens, journalists, even public authorities need an open monitoring tool that will identify Red Flags in order to retain transparency policies, take precautionary measures and prevent these warnings from escalating into project failure [15][16][17][18].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Use of National Strategic Reference Framework Data in Knowledge Graphs and Data Mining to Identify Red Flags

Bratsas

Chondrokostas

Koupidis

et al. 2021

Data

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Red Flags in fiscal projects are warning signs that may indicate underlying problems with their implementation. In this paper, we present how National Strategic Reference Framework Open Data can be used to take full advantage of semantic web technologies and data mining techniques to build a knowledge-based system that identifies Red Flags. We collected the data from the Open Data API provided by the Greek Ministry of Economy and Finance. Data modeling consist of two ontologies; the Vocabulary of Fiscal Projects, describing the fiscal projects and the National Strategic Reference Framework Greece Vocabulary, illustrating the Greek National Strategic Reference Framework data. We transformed the data into RDF triples and uploaded them onto an OpenLink Virtuoso Server, so that we could retrieve them via SPARQL queries. Performance indicators were defined to assess the state of the project and Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise, (DBSCAN) was used to identify Red Flags. User’s demands is that rejected projects should raise Red Flags, to avoid project failure and assist the auditor to organize the monitoring process efficiently, by avoiding to examine most of the non-problematic projects. We performed a use case scenario in which an auditor has to examine NSRF projects, approximately 12 months before the end of the programming period. The system retrieved the fiscal information, calculated the performance indicators and identified the Red Flags. The last update of the projects status after the end of the programming period was retrieved and extracted the number of rejected projects, to test whether the user requirements are satisfied. Rejected projects consist of 3.8% of the total projects. The results of the use case scenario show that RedFlags platform is more likely to identify project failures and not raise Red Flags on not rejected projects. Therefore, the RedFlags platform using open data, assists the auditor to organize the monitoring process better.

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The Changing Faces of Europeanisation: How Did the European Union Influence Corruption in Slovakia Before and After Accession?

Cited by 15 publications

References 31 publications

A free lunch from the EU? Public perceptions of corruption in cohesion policy expenditure in post-communist EU member states

A free lunch from the EU? Public perceptions of corruption in cohesion policy expenditure in post-communist EU member states

Perils of development funding? The tale of EU Funds and grand corruption in Central and Eastern Europe

The Use of National Strategic Reference Framework Data in Knowledge Graphs and Data Mining to Identify Red Flags

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