The Unbundled Corruption Index (UCI) is an alternative, cross-national measure of corruption that unbundles corruption into four distinct types: grand theft, petty theft, speed money, and access money. 

I first introduced a pilot version of the UCI in my book, China's Gilded Age (2020, Chapter 2) (see also my essay in Global Perspectives "Unbundling Corruption" and in Foreign Affairs, "Robber Barons of Beijing.")  I proposed a 2X2 framework that distinguishes among four types of corruption and their different harms, using the analogy of drugs. 

Different types of corruption harm countries in different ways. Petty theft and grand theft are like toxic drugs; they directly and unambiguously hurt the economy by draining public and private wealth while delivering no bene,ts in return. Speed money is akin to painkillers; it may relieve a headache but doesn’t improve one’s strength. Access money, on the other hand, is like steroids. It spurs muscle growth and allows one to perform superhuman feats, but it comes with serious side effects, including the possibility of a complete meltdown. 

To listen, tune in to my podcast with Stephen Dubner on Freakonomics Radio, "Is the US Really Less Corrupt than China?" 

To skim, read my one-page blog here. 

Why the UCI? I was motivated to pilot the UCI due to my frustration with the limitations and hidden biases in standard indices of corruption (e.g., Corruption Perception Index or CPI), which measure corruption as a one-dimensional problem, ranging from 0-100 points. Consistently, they rate rich countries as clean and poor countries as corrupt; in short, the message is: corruption is an exclusively poor-country problem (one expert further asserted before me that corruption is necessarily endemic in Asia, which "we all know is famously cronyistic," she said, whereas "countries like New Zealand and Denmark" don't have this problem.) 

Conventional metrics reflect a first-world, Western bias and a distorted conception of corruption. In fact, corruption comes in qualitatively different types that cause different harms, which cannot be reduced to a single score. Wealthy countries can have corruption in the form of legalized access money, which these metrics routinely fail to capture. As Sally Merry soberly reminds us in The Seductions of Quantification, "global indicators are shaped by inequalities in power" even though "they convey an aura of objective truth." When existing metrics are uncritically plugged into regressions and publications and used by major organizations for risk analysis, their influence and biases multiply many times. 

The purpose of the UCI isn't to criticize the West. Rather, it aims to shift the analytic focus of corruption from only its quantity to its quality (what types of corruption prevail, why, and with what consequences). Today in neoliberal democracies, sophisticated exchanges of power and wealth, which I call access money, is a root cause of public disillusionment with a rigged political system. "Decolonizing" the measurement of corruption, so that it is not only done in the West and with the effect of obscuring problems in the West (whether intentionally or unintentionally), is not only democratizing on a global level, it is necessary for reflecting upon and revitalizing democracies in the first world.