ABSTRACT
If endemic corruption was long held to be a cultural, moral and historical problem [Wraith and Simpkins, 1978] by the 1990s it has clearly become an institutional one. There are hardly any newly elected governments in Latin America, Africa and Asia that do not promise sweeping legal and administrative reforms to reduce corruption. International organisations and bilateral agencies support this trend and have recently linked corruption control to the disbursement of aid or loans. Before corruption became depoliticised in the mid-1990s such initiatives would have been impossible.1
