[ap-intact] COMMENTARY: Assessing Corruption - Do We Need a Number?

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"I’ve occasionally used this platform to complain about widely-repeated corruption statistics that appear to be, at best, unreliable guesstimates misrepresented as precise calculations—and at worst, completely bogus….I recognize that, in the grand scheme of things, made-up statistics and false precision are not that big a deal. After all, the anticorruption community faces 1,634 problems that are more important than false precision, and in any event 43% of all statistics quoted in public debates are completely made up. Yet my strong instincts are that we in the anticorruption community ought to purge these misleading figures from our discussions, and try to pursue not only the academic study of corruption, but also our anticorruption advocacy efforts, using a more rigorous and careful approach to evidence."

More from Matthew Stephenson, in the Global Anticorruption Blog. http://globalanticorruptionblog.com/2016/01/12/assessing-corruption-do-we-need-a-number/

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