Divining the level of corruption: A Bayesian state-space approach

The state-space framework holds many advantages from a practical, an estimation and a theoretical point of view. Most importantly, it significantly expands the period for which the index can be computed while at the same time addressing the selection bias issues that trouble the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). In addition, its estimates are more stable and have smaller confidence intervals than both CPI and WGI. Because the estimation is transparent and data is entered without any manipulations, the estimation procedure is more objective.