Public integrity index: the Visegrad countries' experience

Abstract

Implementing the reforms among the Eastern and Central European countries, even taking into account the possible differences between them, demonstrates the positive movement into decreasing the corruption level. However, the majority of civil society lowly perceive the positive reforms' effects. Moreover, the state of democratization and market economy couldn't be estimated highly because of the political conflicts, economic crises, corruption and non-transparency of internal privatization. In view of the abovementioned, this study is aimed to theoretically investigate the value of the Index of Public Integrity (IPI) in the fight against corruption. The author indicated, that IPI was considered to be a new approach to investigate the level of anti-corruption reforms in different countries. Nowadays, the comprehensive picture of the corruption control in 117 countries are introduced. It should be noticed, that global corruption could be overcome by the common efforts on the international level. Thus, IPI allows comparing similar countries by the regions or income in order to implement the best practices of anti-corruption management. In view of this, the authors emphasized that IPI used to estimate the effects of implementing reforms in order to improve the ones as well as decrease the level of corruption in the countries. Thus, in the frame of this article, the IPI from 2015 to 2019 of the Visegrad countries were considered on the base of six following components of IPI such as: judicial independence, administrative burden, trade openness, budget transparency, e-citizenship as well as freedom of the press. The authors indicated that an effective strategy of anticorruption management demands the collaboration of the government, the business sector, civil society as well as scientific communities in order to develop, realize and estimate the anti-corruption strategies and policy. Moreover, it has been indicated that there was a gap between the corruption theory and practice. In the wake of this, the obtained results in this study could be considered in the scientific society for future investigation in the field of anticorruption management.