Fighting governmental corruption: the New World Bank programme evaluated

Abstract

Over the past decade, the international donor community has come up with a range of initiatives to curb governmental corruption in developing countries. Top-down approaches devise administrative and judicial reforms, whereas bottom-up approaches deal with the process of awareness—raising in civil society. The World Bank currently integrates these top-down and bottom-up approaches in a combined anti-corruption programme. In this paper, the most recent version of this World Bank's training programme is reconstructed and assessed. Several core approaches in the programme, such as the strengthening of civil society and the privatisation of parastatals, turn out to have unintended consequences. The empirical support is largely case-specific and turns out to be highly conditional. It is concluded that indicators need to be developed to assess the relevance of national anti-corruption policies to country-specific governance and anti-corruption conditions. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.