ABSTRACT
There is an intense public and policy debate over whether EU Structural and Cohesion Funds contribute to lower levels of corruption and better governance or conversely fuel government favouritism and erode institutional quality. This chapter focuses on the 27 EU member states with sufficiently sizeable public procurement spending funded by the EU, that is, the EU countries except for Malta – over the 2009-14 period. The spending of EU Funds in public procurement can be directly identified in each contract award announcement, which records the use or non-use of EU Funds along with reference to the corresponding EU programme. While the validity of both corruption risk measures predominantly stems from their direct fit with the definition of high-level corruption in public procurement, it is also underpinned by their association with widely used survey-based macro-level corruption indicators as well as with further micro-level objective indicators of corruption risks.
