DANIEL KAUFMANN,1 World Bank Governance and corruption remain controversial and misunderstood topics. But they are now given higher priority in development circles and by the corporate sector, including multinationals. Indeed, some donors and international financial institutions (IFIs) increasingly work with emerging economies to help reduce corruption, and increase citizen voice, gender equali...

Abstract Has there already been a Grotian Moment for corruption? If not, what would it take new legal rules and doctrines on corruption to crystallise? This article seeks answer these two questions by reviewing the relevant history of international scholarship, current public law framework anticorruption, recent developments in practice. We conclude that may have reached narrow concept corrupti...

Essential characteristics of corruption are (1) reciprocity relationships between bribers and public officials, (2) negative welfare effects, and (3) high penalties when discovered. We separate the influences of these factors in an experiment. In a two-player game reciprocation is economically inefficient through negative externalities. A control treatment without externalities is also conducte...

Enforcement problems are frequently acute in illegal transactions, such as bribery. However, if a government official and a member of the public share informal social or economic ties, this may enable them to enforce bribe transactions by “linking the games”. As a result, official’s incentives to engage in corruption may be affected by the social structure of the society in which they are embed...

This paper considers the possibility of collective action by the business community to counter corruption in the award of government licenses and contracts. The analogy is with contract enforcement institutions studied by economic historians and contract law scholars. The institution in this context comprises a no-bribery norm, a community system to detect violations, and a multilateral ostraci...

Ideas about ‘culture’ have often been used to explain, or excuse, acts of corruption. Gift giving, it is sometimes said, is ‘part of our culture’. Outsiders should not confuse it with bribery or corruption. Such a relativistic approach has been strongly criticized by academic writers on corruption, such as Sayed Alatas in his classic Sociology of Corruption, and by activists, such as Transparen...

I briefly review some of the micro and macro theory of corruption and relate it to various socio-economic and political variables. To quantify the burden of corruption I use Harrison and Vinod's (1992) 95% confidence interval for the marginal excess burden (MEB) of taxation. In developing countries, one dollar of corruption is estimated to impose a burden of $1.67, which becomes very large when...

Corruption can take various forms, including frank bribery and the corruption of knowledge. Prominent in the health field is corruption associated with the pharmaceutical industry. This can impair true freedom to choose optimal therapeutic strategies by misrepresenting less qualified yet more expensive (“pseudo-innovative”) products, resulting in increased expenditures without improvement in th...

Foreign bribery the payment of bribes across borders poses a classic collective action problem in theory. A firm may extract benefits through the payment of bribes to foreign public officials without its own country bearing the associated costs of governmental corruption, and hence while eliminating foreign bribery may be in the best interests of all who are engaged with the global economy, the...