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Johnson, Kaufmann, McMillan, and Woodruff 2000). There are broad differences in
corruption and protection payments between the Commonwealth of Independent States
including Russia, on the one hand, and Central Europe, on the other. An important
complementary finding is established by BEEPS (2003): firms with close connections with
the government did better than other firms, but countries where such connections were seen as
important for business success did worse overall than those where political influence was less
closely tied to economic success.
In macroeconomic empirical research, the phenomenon of postcommunist corruption has
been attributed to: barriers to new businesses entry, the effectiveness of the legal system and
the efficacy and competitiveness of services provided by infrastructure monopolies
(Broadman and Recanatini, 2002); years spent under communism, protestant share of
population, natural resource endowment, and the fact that these countries have not been an
English colony (Treisman, 2003); larger share of central planning in the economy and lack of
structural reforms (Goczek, 2006). Furthermore, the last author finds that fresh members of
the European Union show distinctively lower levels of corruption as compared to other post
communist countries, even when controlling for their higher level of development and less
adverse initial conditions. This effect could be caused by adoption thousands of pages of,
often almost exotic, technical law labelled "Acquis communautaire” that is adopted without
any thought to it. It may be criticized on particularly that ground but this process is setting a
new legal framework not prone to corrupt influences. Clearly, the UE gave a window of
opportunity for a great deal of above average quality legislation and it is good that it was
reasonably well used. Moreover, it seems that the EU was the driving force of the structural
reforms in the region, which decreased the scope for corruption.
Corruption in candidate countries had been one of the EU’s major concerns time after time,
when the European Commission begun publishing its annual progress reports on candidates in
1997. The grounds for that anxiety were simple: the European legal system works (as in
every democratic society) under the assumption that law will be implemented, controlled, and
enforced by the public administration and judiciary of the member states (Peterson, 1997).
Corruption endangers the implementation and execution of rules or makes their adoption
merely formal, as that was the case. A clear implication of both the Regular Reports and the
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