confounding explanation, we investigate whether there are concurrent changes in anticorruption laws, oversight or initiatives to fight corruption adopted by the sample countries. The OECD convention, which has detailed information on country monitoring processes and implementation efforts, does not cover many of our high corruption countries. A search of the World Bank country database on anticorruption laws, agencies and strategies, as well as local country initiatives provides little evidence that countries systematically adopted other anticorruption initiatives around the year of initiating EITI reporting. The only exception, Afghanistan, published proposals to combat corruption in the National Anti-corruption Strategy (aka Azimi report) and the Afghan National Development Strategy in 2008, one year prior to announcing its intention to implement EITI. Afghanistan issued its first EITI report in 2012, covering years March 2008 to March 2010. Given the difficulty identifying specific country anti-corruption initiatives, we attempt to control for them in our analysis by including a time-varying country variable that reflects the quality of government. This variable, produced by the World Bank, perceptions of the “reflects quality of public services, the quality of the civil service and the degree of its independence from political pressures, the quality of policy formulation and implementation, and the credibility of the government's commitment to such It is likely to be correlated with a policies.” country’s anticorruption efforts, but it could also capture any improvements in the government effectiveness from EITI reporting, potentially biasing downward the EITI variable estimates. As reported in Panel B of Table 6, the quality of government estimate is negative and significant. Its inclusion reduces the estimate to 0.13, marginally statistically significant at the 9% level. EITI Public In contrast, for low corruption countries, we find no evidence that adoption of EITI standards or publication of EITI reports is associated with any material change in corruption
confounding explanation, we investigate whether there are concurrent changes in anticorruption laws, oversight or initiatives to fight corruption adopted by the sample countries. The OECD convention, which has detailed information on country monitoring processes and implementation efforts, does not cover many of our high corruption countries. A search of the World Bank country database on anticorruption laws, agencies and strategies, as well as local country initiatives provides little evidence that countries systematically adopted other anticorruption initiatives around the year of initiating EITI reporting. The only exception, Afghanistan, published proposals to combat corruption in the National Anti-corruption Strategy (aka Azimi report) and the Afghan National Development Strategy in 2008, one year prior to announcing its intention to implement EITI. Afghanistan issued its first EITI report in 2012, covering years March 2008 to March 2010. Given the difficulty identifying specific country anti-corruption initiatives, we attempt to control for them in our analysis by including a time-varying country variable that reflects the quality of government. This variable, produced by the World Bank, “reflects perceptions of the quality of public services, the quality of the civil service and the degree of its independence from political pressures, the quality of policy formulation and implementation, and the credibility of the government's commitment to such policies.” It is likely to be correlated with a country’s anticorruption efforts, but it could also capture any improvements in the government effectiveness from EITI reporting, potentially biasing downward the EITI variable estimates. As reported in Panel B of Table 6, the quality of government estimate is negative and significant. Its inclusion reduces the EITI Public estimate to 0.13, marginally statistically significant at the 9% level. In contrast, for low corruption countries, we find no evidence that adoption of EITI standards or publication of EITI reports is associated with any material change in corruption
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