Estimating Corruption Risk across Borders and Years Based on Causal Models

In parallel to the universe of perception indicators, which remain the most widely used when corruption is concerned, efforts have been made to estimate corruption and associated phenomena on the basis of causal models. The determinants used vary in quality, but many of them are rooted in objective data. Such models have been published in quality journals and resulted in the creation of one time or time series indicators of corruption and money laundering risk. These models all use comparisons across a big number of countries, but the estimation of cross-border corruption as a distinct entity and the tracing of change across years remain a challenge. This paper reunites models published in top quality journals to discuss the attempt by BridgeGap, a new Horizon project to go beyond the state of the art.