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Fighting governmental corruption: the New World Bank programme evaluated
Author(s) -
Klein Haarhuis Carolien M.,
Leeuw Frans L.
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
journal of international development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.533
H-Index - 66
eISSN - 1099-1328
pISSN - 0954-1748
DOI - 10.1002/jid.1077
Subject(s) - language change , civil society , corporate governance , relevance (law) , political science , good governance , developing country , unintended consequences , public administration , top down and bottom up design , economic growth , development economics , business , economics , finance , law , politics , engineering , art , literature , software engineering
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.