Corruption is the use of public resources for private gain ? a betrayal of the public trust invested in those individuals with access to public resources. This web-based decision support system provides a platform for analysing the effectiveness of current institutions by gauging the legitimacy of different spheres of governance and social interaction within a given country. It then presents a suite of anti-corruption tools, and assesses their suitability based on those legitimacy ratings.
A web-based tool for locating the propensity for corruption in a country's institutions, which then recommends state-of-the-art policies to deal with specific institutional pathologies.
Unlike tools that attempt to develop aggregate country scores on governance and corruption, DSTAIR looks for weaknesses in each of the many core "spheres" of governance and society: the Legislature, Executive, Political Parties and so on. It is user driven: the program prompts users to make their own assessment about which particular institutions are most in need of reform. Policy recommendations are matched to the user's diagnosis of where the need for action is greatest. The flexibility of DSTAIR allows users to compile a portfolio of analyses of multiple countries in order to compare legitimacy scores across several countries or spheres.
Access the DSTAIR tool using your User ID and password.
Continue to the "Analysis Setup" screen and assign a name and country to your analysis.
A menu of nine institutional spheres essential to every government and society is presented, with questions relating to them for you to answer..
For each sphere, you are asked a series of diagnostic questions about how the institution operates in a country of your choice, and can answer on a scale of 1 to 7.
Aggregate and normalised scores based on the ratings provide you a quick view of the country?s relative institutional strengths against corruption. If you have analysed multiple countries, you will be able to compare these analyses on the Results page as well.
Finally, displaying a suite of appropriate anti-corruption measures and case studies, DSTAIR gives you policy recommendations concerning the specific problems you have diagnosed; for instance, the need for judicial reform, independent commissions, or changes in the funding of political parties.
The user may choose any country, as DSTAIR has been flexibly designed to focus on virtually all countries where the absence of good governance imposes high costs. DSTAIR assumes that the existence of each of the nine spheres, however, you may choose to omit a sphere without effecting the system's functionality.
