Publication:
Measuring the Risk of Corruption and Its Price Impact in North Macedonia 2011–2022

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Files in English
English PDF (10.82 MB)
54 downloads
English Text (107.7 KB)
22 downloads
Date
2024-12-20
ISSN
Published
2024-12-20
Editor(s)
Abstract
Public procurement in North Macedonia amounted to 16 percent of total government expenditure in 2018, or 5 percent of gross domestic product. The country’s public procurement is also vulnerable to corruption risks, which typically push prices up, leading to overspending. To support better budget policies, this paper maps corruption and state capture risks using administrative data on public procurement and examines their impact on prices. The analysis finds that overall corruption risk decreased slightly in 2011–22, with, for example, the single bidding rate remaining around 30 percent. Estimated overpricing at the contracting stage due to corruption risks ranged between 5 and 6 percent of spending throughout the period. The highest savings potentials are presented by lowering single bidding, increasing the use of a simplified open procedure, and advertising tendering opportunities longer. Network analysis of contracting relationships reveals that the 2017 change in government weakened the centrality of high corruption risk groups of organizations, leading to an overall higher integrity core.
Link to Data Set
Citation
Fazekas, Mihaly; Abdou, Aly; Ibrahimi, Klea; Tóth, Bence; Veljanov, Zdravko. 2024. Measuring the Risk of Corruption and Its Price Impact in North Macedonia 2011–2022. Policy Research Working Paper; 11007. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/42575 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.
Associated URLs
Associated content
Report Series
Report Series
Other publications in this report series
  • Publication
    Disentangling the Key Economic Channels through Which Infrastructure Affects Jobs
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-04-03) Vagliasindi, Maria; Gorgulu, Nisan
    This paper takes stock of the literature on infrastructure and jobs published since the early 2000s, using a conceptual framework to identify the key channels through which different types of infrastructure impact jobs. Where relevant, it highlights the different approaches and findings in the cases of energy, digital, and transport infrastructure. Overall, the literature review provides strong evidence of infrastructure’s positive impact on employment, particularly for women. In the case of electricity, this impact arises from freeing time that would otherwise be spent on household tasks. Similarly, digital infrastructure, particularly mobile phone coverage, has demonstrated positive labor market effects, often driven by private sector investments rather than large public expenditures, which are typically required for other large-scale infrastructure projects. The evidence on structural transformation is also positive, with some notable exceptions, such as studies that find no significant impact on structural transformation in rural India in the cases of electricity and roads. Even with better market connections, remote areas may continue to lack economic opportunities, due to the absence of agglomeration economies and complementary inputs such as human capital. Accordingly, reducing transport costs alone may not be sufficient to drive economic transformation in rural areas. The spatial dimension of transformation is particularly relevant for transport, both internationally—by enhancing trade integration—and within countries, where economic development tends to drive firms and jobs toward urban centers, benefitting from economies scale and network effects. Turning to organizational transformation, evidence on skill bias in developing countries is more mixed than in developed countries and may vary considerably by context. Further research, especially on the possible reasons explaining the differences between developed and developing economies, is needed.
  • Publication
    Economic Consequences of Trade and Global Value Chain Integration
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2025-04-04) Borin, Alessandro; Mancini, Michele; Taglioni, Daria
    This paper introduces a new approach to measuring Global Value Chains (GVC), crucial for informed policy-making. It features a tripartite classification (backward, forward, and two-sided) covering trade and production data. The findings indicate that traditional trade-based GVC metrics significantly underestimate global GVC activity, especially in sectors like services and upstream manufacturing, and overstate risks in early trade liberalization stages. Additionally, conventional backward-forward classifications over-estimate backward linkages. The paper further applies these measures empirically to assess how GVC participation mediates the impact of demand shocks on domestic output, highlighting both the exposure and stabilizing potential of GVC integration. These new measures are comprehensively available on the World Bank’s WITS Platform, providing a key resource for GVC analysis.
  • Publication
    Participation in Pension Programs in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-04-24) Giles, John; Joubert, Clément; Tanaka, Tomoaki
    Low- and middle-income countries are aging rapidly but stagnation of growth in participation in pension programs, due to widespread informal employment, presents a major fiscal challenge. Some claim that improving the design of pension program rules can encourage more pension contributions, while others push for universal non-contributory pensions. This paper reviews the recent academic literature on the determinants of active participation in pension systems in high- informality settings. An emerging body of evidence shows that participation responds significantly to financial incentives as well as nonfinancial obstacles. At the same time, pensions are imperfect substitutes for other strategies to cover longevity risk, including support through the family, which will remain crucial for many older people in fiscally constrained environments. Therefore, policy makers should integrate the design of contributory pensions, social pensions, and policies that facilitate other forms of elderly support and consider how all three interact. To inform such efforts, these interactions must be more systematically investigated, and the empirical evidence must be expanded beyond a small number of middle-income countries.
  • Publication
    Capitalizing on Digital Transformation to Enhance the Effectiveness of Property Institutions
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-04-14) Deininger, Klaus; Hilhorst, Thea; Zevenbergen, Jaap; Nkurunziza, Emmanuel
    Property registries have long been a pillar of state capacity and a basis for private market activity. While registry establishment and operation traditionally were costly and time consuming, digital technology makes low-cost registry operation and wide outreach easier. To guide developing countries aiming to establish such registries and measure progress, this paper develops indicators (in terms of digital coverage, interoperability, and property taxation for local service delivery and public land management) of effective digital registry service provision. Data from 85 countries highlight vast differences and provide suggestions for strategic reforms as well as a basis for measuring progress over time. Expanding geographical coverage and collecting these indicators on a regular basis could provide guidance to improve the way in which, by protecting property, the state creates the basis for widely shared prosperity and a livable environment.
  • Publication
    Bridging the Gap
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-04-21) Kruse, Hagen; Ohnsorge, Franziska; Tourek, Gabriel; Xie, Zoe Leiyu
    This paper examines tax revenue shortfalls in South Asian countries. On average during 2019–23, South Asian revenues totaled 18 percent of GDP—well below the average 24 percent among emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs). Econometric estimates from stochastic frontier analysis, which control for tax rates and the size of potential tax bases, suggest that tax revenues in the region are 1 to 7 percentage points of GDP below potential, with shortfalls in five of the region’s eight countries larger than in the average EMDE. Even after controlling for country characteristics, such as widespread informal economic activity outside the tax net and large agriculture sectors, sizable tax gaps remain, suggesting the need for improved tax policy and administration. The paper discusses and provides evidence from international experience with reforms to raise government revenues.
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue

Related items

Showing items related by metadata.

  • Publication
    Corruption Risks and State Capture in Bulgarian Public Procurement
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-05-18) Fazekas, Mihaly; Poltoratskaia, Viktoriia; Tóth, Bence
    This paper sets out to measure and analyze corruption risks, patterns of favoritism, and state capture in public procurement in Bulgaria. It draws on two main types of data: large-scale administrative data on public procurement and the list of politically exposed persons. The analysis rests on calculating individual corruption risk indicators (or red flags), such as single bidding in competitive markets, and creating a composite Corruption Risk Index based on these indicators. It maps the distribution of these red flags over time, across different regions and markets. The analysis finds that Bulgaria shows high corruption risk among other examined countries in the European Union, with weak institutions contributing to slow gross domestic product per capita convergence to Western European countries. The results point out that corruption risks have deteriorated over time. Combining suppliers’ political connections information with public procurement corruption risk data shows that connections are associated with higher risks, in particular connections to local government members and state-owned enterprises. The large-scale analysis of buyer-supplier contracting networks points at state capture patterns where groups of buyers and suppliers repeatedly connect in high corruption risk procurement contracts. Such groups have gained more power and control over a larger share of contracts since 2016. Finally, policy recommendations are provided in three areas: enhancing data scope and quality, introducing a data-driven approach to corruption risk assessment, and improving public procurement policy and practices to reduce noncompetitive tenders.
  • Publication
    Procuring Low Growth
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-03-14) Fazekas, Mihaly; Poltoratskaya, Viktoriia; Schiffbauer, Marc; Tóth, Bence
    This paper assesses the impact of favoritism in public procurement on private sector productivity growth. To this end, it combines three novel microeconomic data sets: administrative data on firms, including more than 4 million firm-year observations and rich financial and ownership information; public procurement transaction data for 150,000 published contracts and their tenders; and a newly assembled data set on firms’ political connections, drawing on asset declarations, sanction lists, and offshore leaks. This comprehensive data set allows tracing the impact of favoritism in allocating government contracts to economic growth. The findings show that politically connected firms are 18 to 32 percent more likely to win public procurement contracts due to their preferential access to uncompetitive tenders. Public procurement results in higher subsequent productivity and employment growth only if it has been awarded through competitive tenders. Firms winning contracts through uncompetitive procedures have flat growth but higher profit margins. Consistent with these findings, the paper shows that firms that are awarded uncompetitive public procurement contracts obtain rents of 9 to 11 percent from overpaid contracts. The results suggest that aggregate annual total factor productivity growth would have been 8 percent higher in the absence of favoritism in public procurement.
  • Publication
    Green Is Less Greedy
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-11-26) Poltoratskaia, Viktoriia; Fazekas, Mihaly; Quintero, Maria Fernanda; Schiffbauer, Marc
    Although green public procurement has been established as a desirable policy goal across the globe, especially in the European Union, its scope and impacts remain severely understudied. This paper provides insights into the prevalence and structure of green public procurement in Bulgaria, which is a sustainability laggard within the European Union and hence a least likely champion of green public procurement. The paper also estimates the impacts of green procurement on traditional procurement and economic outcomes: competition, corruption risks, and overall productivity. Using novel data and more comprehensive methods than previous studies, the analysis finds that green public procurement amounted to about 10 to 20 percent of total public procurement spending in Bulgaria in 2011–19. Most descriptors and requirements of green public procurement are found in titles, technical requirements, and product descriptions. Green criteria in award criteria texts, which are mainly used for flagging green public procurement in the literature, have been marginal in comparison. Green public procurement is estimated to improve competition for government contracts among firms, for example by increasing the prevalence of market entrants by 3 to 7 percentage points. Green public procurement contracts are also less prone to corruption risks. For example, they are 0.6 to 1.5 percentage points less likely to receive a single bidder. Finally, green public procurement enhances the efficiency of resource allocation in the economy by helping to channel public resources to more productive firms, for example to those that have 14 percent higher labor productivity. This effect is at least in part explained by the positive interaction between green public procurement and the lower risk of corruption. The findings strengthen the case for pursuing green public procurement goals as they offer synergies with traditional public procurement goals.
  • Publication
    Measuring and Reducing the Impact of Corruption in Infrastructure
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2006-12) Kenny, Charles
    This paper examines what we can say about the extent and impact of corruption in infrastructure in developing countries using existing evidence. It looks at different approaches to estimating the extent of corruption and reports on the results of such studies. It suggests that there is considerable evidence that most existing perceptions measures appear to be very weak proxies for the actual extent of corruption in the infrastructure sector, largely (but inaccurately) measuring petty rather than grand corruption. Existing survey evidence is more reliable, but limited in extent and still subject to sufficient uncertainty that it should not be used as a tool for differentiating countries in terms of access to infrastructure finance or appropriate policy models. The paper discusses evidence for the relative costs of corruption impacts and suggests that a focus on bribe payments as the indicator of the costs of corruption in infrastructure may be misplaced. It draws some conclusions regarding priorities for infrastructure anti-corruption research and activities in projects, in particular regarding disaggregated and actionable indicators of weak governance and corruption.
  • Publication
    Auction Length and Prices
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-04) Borges de Oliveira, Alexandre; Fabregas, Abdoulaye; Fazekas, Mihaly
    Electronic reverse auctions are the most used competitive method for procurement of goods and non-consulting services by the Federal Government of Brazil. These auctions are closed randomly, which perfectly satisfies fairness considerations but may be suboptimal from an efficiency perspective. There are concerns that tenders are closed too early and randomness favors bidders with algorithmic bidding software, leading to high prices. Hence, this paper investigates what would happen if the random closing rule was replaced by another rule. The paper uses the complete data set of completed electronic actions in 2015–17 comprising 112 million bids for 0.9 million items purchased. Exploiting the random closing rule, simple OLS models are run with a wide set of fixed effects as well as covariates capturing competition. The findings point at alternative strategies to optimize auction design: simple actions such as increasing the average and minimum length of the random phase can result in 2.8 and 0.6 percent price savings, respectively, or R$540 million and R$116 million per year; or more complex designs such as setting the length to the maximum for the random phase if there are 15 bidders or more can yield 2.6 percent or R$ 500 million a year in price savings, or doing the same if a large discount is placed within three minutes to closing can yield 1.1 percent lower prices or R$ 210 million a year in savings.

Users also downloaded

Showing related downloaded files

  • Publication
    Europe and Central Asia Economic Update, Fall 2024: Better Education for Stronger Growth
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-10-17) Izvorski, Ivailo; Kasyanenko, Sergiy; Lokshin, Michael M.; Torre, Iván
    Economic growth in Europe and Central Asia (ECA) is likely to moderate from 3.5 percent in 2023 to 3.3 percent this year. This is significantly weaker than the 4.1 percent average growth in 2000-19. Growth this year is driven by expansionary fiscal policies and strong private consumption. External demand is less favorable because of weak economic expansion in major trading partners, like the European Union. Growth is likely to slow further in 2025, mostly because of the easing of expansion in the Russian Federation and Turkiye. This Europe and Central Asia Economic Update calls for a major overhaul of education systems across the region, particularly higher education, to unleash the talent needed to reinvigorate growth and boost convergence with high-income countries. Universities in the region suffer from poor management, outdated curricula, and inadequate funding and infrastructure. A mismatch between graduates' skills and the skills employers are seeking leads to wasted potential and contributes to the region's brain drain. Reversing the decline in the quality of education will require prioritizing improvements in teacher training, updated curricula, and investment in educational infrastructure. In higher education, reforms are needed to consolidate university systems, integrate them with research centers, and provide reskilling opportunities for adult workers.
  • Publication
    Is the U.S. Friend-Shoring, Nearshoring, or Reshoring? Evidence from Greenfield Investment Announcements
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-12-20) Mulabdic, Alen; Nayyar, Gaurav
    This paper examines the evolution of greenfield investment announcements—both domestic and international—for US multinational companies in response to recent global shocks. The results indicate an intensification of reshoring and nearshoring activities by US companies, especially following the Russian Federation’s invasion of Ukraine. This shift is estimated to have doubled the number of direct jobs associated with greenfield investment announcements in the US and its neighboring countries. The paper finds no evidence that US companies are adopting a friend-shoring strategy by investing more in military allies. The paper suggests that US supply chains are likely to become less global and more regional as these investments become operational.
  • Publication
    Geopolitics and the World Trading System
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-12-23) Mattoo, Aaditya; Ruta, Michele; Staige, Robert W.
    Until the beginning of this century, the GATT/WTO system worked. Economic research provided a compelling explanation. It showed that if governments maximize the well-being of their own countries broadly defined, GATT/WTO principles would facilitate mutually beneficial cooperation over their trade policy choices. Now heightened geopolitical rivalry seems to have undermined the WTO. A simple transposition of the previous rationalization suggests that geopolitics and trade cooperation are not compatible. The paper shows that this is only true if rivalry eclipses any consideration of own-country well-being. In all other circumstances, there are gains from trade cooperation even with geopolitics. Furthermore, the WTO’s relevance is in question only if it adheres too rigidly to its existing rules and norms. Through measured adaptation to the geopolitical imperative, the WTO can continue to thrive as a forum for multilateral trade cooperation in the age of geopolitics.
  • Publication
    Land Price Effects of Informality, Farm Size, and Land Reform
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-01-02) Deininger, Klaus; Ali, Daniel Ayalew
    This paper uses a rich set of geo-coded administrative and remotely sensed data on more than 1 million agricultural land transactions in Ukraine to explore how informality, size, and recent land reforms affect land prices. Three main findings are highlighted. First, absence of registered rights generates large negative externalities, the size of which plausibly exceeds the cost of registering all land. By contrast, informality of lease contracts is a choice that may enable owners to evade regulatory obstacles that prevent them from renegotiating contracts to obtain more favorable terms. Second, while land market liberalization generated significant indirect benefits, gains are unevenly distributed. Furthermore, competition in sales markets remains limited, pointing to scope for measures—including reducing the transaction costs of selling land and accessing mortgage finance, improving publicity of pending land sales, and use of electronic auctions—to enhance the reforms’ impact on efficiency and equity. Third, size at the parcel, field, and farm levels is associated with higher per hectare prices, pointing to scope for market-based land consolidation and growth of medium-size farms to increase land values and productivity. Achieving this potential will require measures to limit speculative land acquisition and exercise of market power by making local land markets more competitive and using market-based land valuation as a basis for taxing land on a recurrent basis and any capital gains due to land appreciation.
  • Publication
    Expanding Financial Inclusion through Digital Financial Services
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-12-23) Klapper, Leora
    Worldwide, account ownership increased by 50 percent in the 10 years spanning 2011 to 2021, to reach 76 percent of the global adult population. The goal of financial inclusion is not just for more adults to have accounts but for account owners to benefit from using them, such as for digital payments, which provide a range of positive benefits that extend far beyond convenience. This paper reviews the evidence demonstrating how digital payments can expand financial inclusion among recipients and encourage the use of additional formal financial services, such as savings, credit, and insurance. It explores how digital transactions offer greater security and privacy, especially for women, as well as opportunities to build a digital credit history for credit risk assessments. The introduction of digital payments to low-income adults brings some risks, however, such as fraud and phishing scams targeting accounts, over indebtedness in digital credit, and customers receiving incomplete or incorrect information on the fees and costs of financial products.