Managing Conflict of Interest - Organisation for Economic Co ...

Defining Conflict of Interest 11duties and private aims. But in countries that have yet to achieveany great measure of democratic control, expectations in thisregard remain low; and the same applies to countries that haveonly recently democratized which have a previous history of corruptionand abuse of power. 2The next section offers some definitions and an analyticalframework for considering the issues. This is followed by an examinationof various countries’ experiences, starting with Great Britainover the last few hundred years, and continuing with a brief commentaryon the more recent experience of six other countries: US,Russia, People’s Republic of China, India, Indonesia, and Singapore.Table 1 provides a snapshot of how Great Britain and these sixother countries ranked in terms of how the control of corruptionwas perceived in 2006 (and ipso facto how they ranked in termsof their control of conflicts of interest). Table 2 shows the data forthese countries going back to 1996. The data are taken from theWorld Bank Institute’s recently published Worldwide GovernanceIndicators (WGIs) and are based on surveys undertaken inside andoutside each country.Table 1: Control of Corruption in Selected CountriesCountry Year PercentileRank(0–100)GovernanceScore(–2.5 to +2.5)StandardErrorSingapore 2006 98.1 2.3 0.14United Kingdom 2006 93.7 1.86 0.15United States 2006 89.3 1.3 0.15India 2006 52.9 –0.21 0.13P.R. China 2006 37.9 –0.53 0.14Russia 2006 24.3 –0.76 0.12Indonesia 2006 23.3 –0.77 0.132For example, although the Transparency International Corruption PerceptionIndex for 2006 ranked the United Kingdom about 100 places above Russia,according to the TI Global Corruption Barometer 2006 the proportion of Britishand Russian respondents who felt that their governments’ actions againstcorruption were ineffective was about the same.ADB/OECD Anti-Corruption Initiative for Asia and the Pacific