Infrastructure for Whom? Corruption Risks in Infrastructure Provision Across Europe

Infrastructure construction involves vast public funds in highly complex projects comprehensible only to a few. Central and Eastern European and Mediterranean countries engage in public infrastructure procurement at a higher corruption risk than Western European countries. Public goals can be compromised in at least three direct ways: 1) distorting spending structure and project design; 2) inflating prices; and 3) contributing to delayed and low quality provision, even non-completion. This chapter analyses the first two of these to assess problem hotspots. The findings indicate that corruption steers infrastructure spending towards high value investment projects and inflates prices by 30–50 per cent on average, with the largest excesses in high corruption risk regions. Based on these findings, this chapter recommends that infrastructure be monitored using open datasets and state-of-the-art analytical tools, that spending is closely linked to user demand, and that a tailor-made implementation regime is applied to large European Union-funded projects.