development will be comparatively small. This suggests a focus on medium-term expenditure frameworks, public expenditure tracking surveys and physical audits as key corruption measurement tools in infrastructure.

An advantage of such an approach is that it may be easier to find good metrics than in the case of sector- and type-specific direct corruption indicators. Rather than relying on perceptions or expert intuition, an approach that relies on inputs and outputs can use objective indicators. We have good benchmarks for the cost of maintaining different classes of road, for example. Is the national budget putting aside adequate resources to fully maintain the country’s road network based on those benchmarks? We have many years of experience in project evaluation which should allow us to determine if project selection in a given sector appears to be following rational procedures or is driven by other concerns. It is a comparatively simple engineering task to determine if a road or pipeline has been constructed and maintained adequately or poorly through a physical audit.<sup>29</sup> Further work is needed (and is underway) in the area of sectoral approaches to corruption that could flesh out such ideas (see Table 12), but the model provided by REDIs (Recent Economic Developments in Infrastructure) already incorporates much of the required analysis for such an approach.<sup>30</sup> Such a measurement approach would involve errors of commission and omission. The ‘wrong’ project can be selected on the grounds of political interest absent private gain. Poor construction and maintenance can be the result of incompetence and inefficiency as well as corruption. But the project still remains the ‘wrong’ project, for whatever reason it was selected. Poor construction and maintenance remains a significant drag on development performance whatever its cause. And as suggested by the very high correlations between the perception-driven measures of corruption and governance that we have, disentangling different types of governance failure will be a very difficult, and quite possibly mistaken, exercise regardless. As a result, the errors of commission are comparatively minor in terms of the indicators’ abilities to measure overall development impact.

Regarding errors of omission, it may be that well-built projects involve corruption which raises the price of construction or that consumers accessing well-maintained networks still have to make speed payments or are illegally connected. This is, of course, a legitimate issue of concern. Measuring contract prices against benchmarks and business and customer surveys can play an important role in uncovering and measuring such corruption. But it is worth repeating that his type of corruption is likely to be less damaging in terms of development impact.<sup>31</sup>

> 29 For example, in the Philippines, physical audits combined with a GIS system are being used to determine if roads and bridges actually exist and what state they are in as part of a drive towards improved transport governance.  Furthermore, especially at the level of project selection and measurement of infrastructure quality, there is no need to survey 100 percent of proposed projects or infrastructure stocks –a random representative sample would suffice to suggest if the sector is performing well.

> 30 REDIs or equivalents have been completed in a number of countries including Colombia and Morocco. 31 Of course, this will depend on the level of such payments –if they start doubling contract prices, for example, they will become a serious issue, but luckily also much easier to spot.

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