The composite indexes on public sector integrity (Index of Robustness of the Financial and Non-Financial Interest Disclosure System and Quality of Regulations Against Undue Influence Index) are a first attempt at measuring the quality and scope of regulations on practices that can hinder the governance of a country, such as illicit enrichment and undue influence on policy-making. These indexes are de jure, and do not measure the effective implementation of such regulations. They were originally published in La Integridad Pública en América Latina y el Caribe 2018-2019: De Gobiernos Reactivos a Estados Proactivos (OECD, 2019)
The data for both indexes come from the 2018 OECD Questionnaire on Public Integrity in Latin America to which 12 countries responded. Respondents were predominantly senior officials in central government, supreme audit institutions and electoral commissions. Since they are at their pilot stage, they are subject to change in the near future.
The Index of Robustness of the Financial and Non-Financial Interest Disclosure System measures the scope of regulations on financial and non-financial interest. It ranges from 0 to 1, being 0 the lowest and 1 the highest score, which entails a robust system. It has five main components:
verification and enforcement gauges whether the information submitted in asset declarations is verified and how, and the existence of sanctions in case of irregularities,
reach considers the categories of public officials that are required to submit asset declarations, at what point of the appointment they must be submitted, and what information public officials must disclose,
system design includes the degree of digitalisation of the system, among others,
transparency captures whether asset declarations are made available to the public, and
prevention of conflicts of interest considers the efforts to detect possible conflicts of interest and how these are managed and resolved.
Individual questions of the questionnaire were grouped by theme and included in each indicator, which are grouped into the five main components. Standardization was done at the level of indicators, which entails that indicator scores are comparable. Some indicators are highly biased (for instance, “when”, for this indicator all countries except one obtained the maximum score). Nevertheless, due to their conceptual relevance, and their potential discriminatory power, they hav not been discarded. Since the sample of countries is smaller than the amount of indicators, it was not possible to conduct multivariate analysis (such as factor analysis or principal component analysis) to classify indicators into components in the index. The weighting of indicators followed a budget allocation approach (OECD/EU/JRC, 2008), where a total of 100 points were distributed by expert judgement following the underlying theoretical framework. The indicators that are not distinctively unique and can be analysed jointly with others form the subcomponents of the index (for instance, cross-checking and audit).
