This book considers how emerging economies around the world face the challenge of building good institutions and effective governance, since so much of economic development depends on having these in place. The promotion of shared prosperity and the battle against poverty require interventions to reach out to the poor and the disadvantaged. Yet time and again we have seen such effort foild or diminished by corruption and leakage. The creation of good governance and institutions and structures to combat corruption require determination and passion but also intricate design rooted in data, analysis, and research. In this book, leading researchers from around the world bring to the table some of the best available ideas to help create better governance structures, design laws for corruption control, and nurture good institutions.

A passionate examination of why international anti-corruption fails to deliver results and how we should understand and build good governance.

Recent research demonstrates that the quality of public institutions is crucial for a number of important environmental, social, economic, and political outcomes, and thereby human well-being. The Quality of Government (QoG) approach directs attention to issues such as impartiality in the exercise of public power, professionalism in public service delivery, effective measures against corruption, and meritocracy instead of patronage and nepotism. This Handbook offers a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of this rapidly expanding research field and also identifies viable avenues for future research. The initial chapters focus on theoretical approaches and debates, and the central question of how QoG can be measured. A second set of chapters examines the wealth of empirical research on how QoG relates to democratization, social trust and cohesion, ethnic diversity, happiness and human wellbeing, democratic accountability, economic growth and inequality, political legitimacy, environmental sustainability, gender equality, and the outbreak of civil conflicts. The remaining chapters turn to the perennial issue of which contextual factors and policy approaches—national, local, and international—have proven successful (and not so successful) for increasing QoG. The Quality of Government approach both challenges and complements important strands of inquiry in the social sciences. For research about democratization, QoG adds the importance of taking state capacity into account. For economics, the QoG approach shows that in order to produce economic prosperity, markets need to be embedded in institutions with a certain set of qualities. For development studies, QoG emphasizes that issues relating to corruption are integral to understanding development writ large.

Identifies the major weaknesses in the current United Nations system and proposes fundamental reforms to address each. This title is also available as Open Access.

Much of the devastation caused by the recent earthquake in Turkey was the result of widespread corruption between the construction industry and government officials. Corruption is part of everyday public life and we tend to take it for granted. However, preventing corruption helps to raise city revenues, improve service delivery, stimulate public confidence and participation, and win elections. This book is designed to help citizens and public officials diagnose, investigate and prevent various kinds of corrupt and illicit behaviour. It focuses on systematic corruption rather than the free-lance activity of a few law-breakers, and emphasises practical preventive measures rather than purely punitive or moralistic campaigns.

Reveals how meaningful corruption control by authoritarian regimes is surprisingly common and follows a different playbook than democratic anti-corruption reform.

This book presents a radically new approach of how societies can bring corruption under control. Since the late 1990s, the detrimental effects of corruption to human well-being have become well established in research. This has resulted in a stark increase in anti-corruption programs launched by international organizations such as the World Bank, the African Union, the EU, as well as many national development organizations. Despite these efforts, evaluations of the effects of these anti-corruption programs have been disappointing. As it can be measured, it is difficult to find substantial effects from such anti-corruption programs. The argument in this book is that this huge policy failure can be explained by three factors. Firstly, it argues that the corruption problem has been poorly conceptualized since what should count as the opposite of corruption has been left out. Secondly, the problem has been located in the wrong social spaces. It is neither a cultural nor a legal problem. Instead, it is for the most part located in what organization theory defines as the 'standard operating procedures' in social organizations. Thirdly, the general theory that has dominated anti-corruption efforts -- the principal-agent theory -- is based on serious misspecification of the basic nature of the problem. The book presents a reconceptualization of corruption and a new theory -- drawing on the tradition of the social contract - to explain it and motivate policies of how to get corruption under control. Several empirical cases serve to underpin this new theory ranging from the historical organization of religious practices to specific social policies, universal education, gender equality, and auditing. Combined, these amount to a strategic theory known as 'the indirect approach'.

Why have so few countries managed to leave systematic corruption behind, while in many others modernization is still a mere façade? How do we escape the trap of corruption, to reach a governance system based on ethical universalism? In this unique book, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi and Michael Johnston lead a team of eminent researchers on an illuminating path towards deconstructing the few virtuous circles in contemporary governance. The book combines a solid theoretical framework with quantitative evidence and case studies from around the world. While extracting lessons to be learned from the success cases covered, Transitions to Good Governance avoids being prescriptive and successfully contributes to the understanding of virtuous circles in contemporary good governance.

In the aftermath of the invasion of Afghanistan, the U.S. Agency for International Development supported the Afghan Ministry of Public Health to deliver basic healthcare to 90 percent of the population, at a cost of $4.50 a head. The program played a vital role in improving the country's health; the number of children dying before the age of five dropped by 100,000 a year. But accounting standards at the Ministry of Public Health concerned the United States Special Investigator General for Afghanistan. There was no evidence of malfeasance, nor argument about the success of the program. For all that the results were fantastic, receipts were not in order. The investigator called for the health program to be suspended because of "financial management deficiencies" at the ministry. This case illustrates a growing problem: an important and justified focus on corruption as a barrier to development has led to policy change in aid agencies that is damaging the potential for aid to deliver results. Donors have treated corruption as an issue they can measure and improve, and from which they can insulate their projects at acceptable costs by controlling processes and monitoring receipts. Results Not Receipts highlights the weak link between donors’ preferred measures of corruption and development outcomes related to our limited ability to measure the problem. It discusses the costs of the standard anti-corruption tools of fiduciary controls and centralized delivery, and it suggests a different approach to tackling the problem of corruption in development: focus on outcomes.

Drawing on global empirical evidence, Li offers a novel explanation to the age-old puzzle of why some countries thrive despite corruption.