The Effectiveness of eu Law: Insights from the eu Legal Framework on Asset Confiscation

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Brill via https://doi.org/10.1163/15718174-24012083Based on an institutional and legal mapping of the field across Europe, this article explores the different barriers to the effectiveness of the eu’s regime on the recovery and confiscation of proceeds of crime. The aim is to provide a better understanding of the challenges that arise in this field and suggest possible areas of legal or policy intervention. But it is also — using the example of asset confiscation — to contribute to debates about the effectiveness of the eu’s legal strategy in building a genuine area of freedom, security and justice. The article argues that, despite the adoption of new legislation in this field and the stronger institutional framework introduced by the Treaty of Lisbon, the effectiveness of the eu’s action is unlikely to significantly improve. The legal rules still present a number of deficiencies and the emphasis on formal legal solutions has come at the expense of broader questions of transposition and utilisation, which are however crucial to ensuring effective recovery.The authors would like to express their gratitude to colleagues at RAND Europe, namely Barry Irving and James Forsaith; and researchers at the ANTICORRP research project, namely Salvatore Sberna and Pedro Gomes Pereira. In addition, the authors would also like to thank the anonymous reviewer for providing constructive and critical comments

From Corruption to State Capture: A New Analytical Framework with Empirical Applications from Hungary

State capture and corruption are widespread phenomena across the globe, but their empirical study still lacks sufficient analytical tools. This paper develops a new conceptual and analytical framework for gauging state capture based on microlevel contractual networks in public procurement. To this end, it establishes a novel measure of corruption risk in government contracting focusing on the behavior of individual organizations. Then, it identifies clusters of highcorruption-risk organizations in the full contractual network of procuring authorities and their suppliers using formal social network analysis. Densely connected clusters of high-corruption-risk organizations are denoted as the domain of state capture. The paper demonstrates the power of the new analytical framework by exploring how the radical centralization of the governing elite following the 2010 elections in Hungary affected centralization of state capture. Findings indicate the feasibility and usefulness of such microlevel approach to corruption and state capture. Better understanding the network structure of corruption and state capture opens new avenues for research and policy on anticorruption, budget deficit, market competition, and quality of democracy. Supporting further empirical studies of corruption, the data are made available at digiwhist.eu/resources/dataThe authors would like to express their gratitude for two EU funded projects at the Budapest Corvinus University (TAMOP 4.2.2.B and ANTICORRP (Grant agreement no: 290529)) even though they relied extensively on their voluntary contributions for realising this article

Careers, connections and corruption risks

Why do officials in some countries favor entrenched contractors, while others assign public contracts more impartially? This article emphasizes the important interplay between politics and bureaucracy. It suggests that corruption risks are lower when bureaucrats’ careers do not depend on political connections but on their peers. We test this hypothesis with a novel measure of career incentives in the public sector—using a survey of more than 18,000 public sector employees in 212 European regions—and a new objective corruption risk measure including over 1.4 million procurement contracts. Both show a remarkable subnational variation across Europe. The study finds that corruption risks are indeed significantly lower where bureaucrats’ career incentives exclusively follow professional criteria. In substantial terms, moving EU regions so that bureaucrats’ merit and effort would matter as much as in, for example, Baden-Wüttemberg (90th percentile) could lead to a 13–20 billion Euro savings per year.Funding for this project comes from the Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Development of the European Union, project number 290529. This research project is part of ANTICORRP, (http://anticorrp.eu/ )

The gendered effects of foreign investment and prolonged state ownership on mortality in Hungary: an indirect demographic, retrospective cohort study.

BACKGROUND: Research on the health outcomes of globalisation and economic transition has yielded conflicting results, partly due to methodological and data limitations. Specifically, the outcomes of changes in foreign investment and state ownership need to be examined using multilevel data, linking macro-effects and micro-effects. We exploited the natural experiment offered by the Hungarian economic transition by means of a multilevel study designed to address these gaps in the scientific literature. METHODS: For this indirect demographic, retrospective cohort study, we collected multilevel data related to Hungary between 1995 and 2004 from the PrivMort database and other sources at the town, company, and individual level to assess the relation between the dominant company ownership of a town and mortality. We grouped towns into three ownership categories: dominant state, domestic private, and foreign ownership. We did population surveys in these towns to collect data on vital status and other characteristics of survey respondents' relatives. We assessed the relation between dominant ownership and mortality at the individual level. We used discrete-time survival modelling, adjusting for town-level and individual-level confounders, with clustered SEs. FINDINGS: Of 83 eligible towns identified, we randomly selected 52 for inclusion in the analysis and analysed ownership data from 262 companies within these towns. Additionally, between June 16, 2014, and Dec 22, 2014, we collected data on 78 622 individuals from the 52 towns, of whom 27 694 were considered eligible. After multivariable adjustment, we found that women living in towns with prolonged state ownership had significantly lower odds of dying than women living in towns dominated by domestic private ownership (odds ratio [OR] 0·74, 95% CI 0·61-0·90) or by foreign investment (OR 0·80, 0·69-0·92). INTERPRETATION: Prolonged state ownership was associated with protection of life chances during the post-socialist transformation for women. The indirect economic benefits of foreign investment do not translate automatically into better health without appropriate industrial and social policies. FUNDING: The European Research Council

Mortality in Transition: Study Protocol of the PrivMort Project, a multilevel convenience cohort study.

BACKGROUND: Previous research using routine data identified rapid mass privatisation as an important driver of mortality crisis following the collapse of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe. However, existing studies on the mortality crisis relying on individual level or routine data cannot assess both distal (societal) and proximal (individual) causes of mortality simultaneously. The aim of the PrivMort Project is to overcome these limitations and to investigate the role of societal factors (particularly rapid mass privatisation) and individual-level factors (e.g. alcohol consumption) in the mortality changes in post-communist countries. METHODS: The PrivMort conducts large-sample surveys in Russia, Belarus and Hungary. The approach is unique in comparing towns that have undergone rapid privatisation of their key industrial enterprises with those that experienced more gradual forms of privatisation, employing a multi-level retrospective cohort design that combines data on the industrial characteristics of the towns, socio-economic descriptions of the communities, settlement-level data, individual socio-economic characteristics, and individuals' health behaviour. It then incorporates data on mortality of different types of relatives of survey respondents, employing a retrospective demographic approach, which enables linkage of historical patterns of mortality to exposures, based on experiences of family members. By May 2016, 63,073 respondents provided information on themselves and 205,607 relatives, of whom 102,971 had died. The settlement-level dataset contains information on 539 settlements and 12,082 enterprises in these settlements in Russia, 96 settlements and 271 enterprises in Belarus, and 52 settlement and 148 enterprises in Hungary. DISCUSSION: In addition to reinforcing existing evidence linking smoking, hazardous drinking and unemployment to mortality, the PrivMort dataset will investigate the variation in transition experiences for individual respondents and their families across settlements characterized by differing contextual factors, including industrial characteristics, simultaneously providing information about how excess mortality is distributed across settlements with various privatization strategies.The study was funded by European Research Council (a competitive externally peer reviewed Advanced Grant Scheme, grant agreement No. 269036).This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from BioMed Central at http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-016-3249-

Procurement and Competition in Swedish Municipalities.

This paper asks if low political competition is associated with manipulation of public procurement pro-cesses. Using unique Swedish municipal data from 2009 to 2015, it demonstrates that when one party dominates local politics, procurement quality decreases and corruption risks increase. Most striking is that the risk for getting only one bid on what is intended to be an open tender considerably increases with longstanding one-party-rule. Findings suggest that entrenched parties are able to exert favoritistic control over public procurement due to less well-functioning internal and external control mechanisms: bureau-cratic human capital decreases, municipal audits are more prone to be controlled by the ruling majority, and politicians are less susceptible to media pressure. These results are particularly interesting from a comparative perspective since Sweden, being an old democracy with a meritocratic bureaucracy, low levels of corruption and clientelism is an unlikely case in which to find these tendencies

Framework for Assessing, Improving and Enhancing Health Service Planning

Based on case studies of Germany, Austria, Canada, and New Zealand, proposes criteria for assessing and improving health planning systems for the efficient allocation of resources, including comprehensiveness, accountability, and high-quality data

Grand corruption and the authoritarian turn

If incoming governments in liberal democracies wish to use public contracts to benefit those loyal to them, they face institutional constraints. To implement corrupt procurement strategies they would need to sabotage these checks and balances. By comparing procurement data from Hungary and the UK, Liz Dávid-Barrett and Mihály Fazekas can identify the relative effect of such anti-democratic institutional changes, as seen in Hungary, on government patronage

Replication Data for: Uncovering high-level corruption: Cross-national objective corruption risk indicators using public procurement data

Measuring high-level corruption is subject to extensive scholarly and policy interest with moderate progress in the last decade. We develop two objective proxy measures of high-level corruption in public procurement: single bidding in competitive markets and a composite score of tendering 'red flags'. Using official government data of 2.8 million contracts in 28 European countries in 2009-2014, we directly operationalize a common definition of corruption: unjustified restriction of access to public contracts to favour a selected bidder. Corruption indicators are calculated at the contract level, but produce aggregate indices consistent with well-established country-level indicators, and also validated by micro-level tests. Further data is published at http://digiwhist.eu/resources/data/