Resumen de Postcommunist Transitions and Corruption: Mapping Patterns
It is now almost a quarter of a century since the anti-communist revolution began in Eastern Europe and the USSR, so that sufficient time has passed for some (relatively) early patterns to be discerned. The focus here will be on corruption and how it relates to postcommunist transition, including the democratization process. In its 1999 assessment of global corruption in the second half of the 1990s, the World Bank ranked the Commonwealth of Independent States as the most corrupt region of the world, with Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltic states not far behind. Since this is a comparative analysis, patterns identified and explanations proffered here have mostly been aggregate ones. But while tendencies are identifiable across groups of countries, there are always additional factors that explain the corruption situation in individual states. The Georgian, Romanian, and Russian situations have already been briefly considered. Another "special case" is Estonia, which emerges in almost all indices as far less corrupt than all other postcommunist states
