To substantially reduce bribery and corruption in all their forms: a multidimensional index of progress on Sustainable Development Goal 16.5

Abstract

Corruption thwarts development and human flourishing. For this reason, target 16.5 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 16.5) exhorts nations “to substantially reduce corruption and bribery in all their forms.” The current metrics, however, are ill-defined and limited in scope, neither specifying “substantial” nor encompassing “all its forms.” Thus, unlike other targets, the indicators fail to measure the phenomenon adequately or to define the conditions under which the target is reached. We propose a new Multidimensional Index of Progress Against Corruption (MIPAC) to measure countries’ achievement of SDG 16.5. Employing non-proprietary datasets and the multidimensional methodology popular in the poverty literature, the MIPAC takes into account 21 types of corruption and provides a count of the types of corruption in which each country has advanced significantly since 2015. The MIPAC allows us to distinguish better between countries’ improvement and to identify the types of corruption (dimensions) in which each country needs to make more progress. We find that 137 of 186 countries improved on at least one dimension between 2015 and 2022; the highest score is 13. The dimensions on which the most countries improved (66 countries each) are police bribery and bribery related to red tape, while the least progress was made in legislative corruption, with only five countries improving substantially in this area. This index is replicable on an annual basis and represents a potential standard for setting anti-corruption goals beyond 2030. The methodology can be adapted to sub-national data and to other phenomena.