ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how principal-agent and collective action explanations for the persistence of corruption are not necessarily competing, but are usefully complementary. The effort to control corruption in the developing world has grown seemingly exponentially; it has attracted support from all major aid agencies and has inspired hundreds of reform projects, action plans, anti-corruption agencies and a growing class of in-demand experts. The predominance of principal-agent theory in corruption research has been clearly demonstrated by a meta-analysis of 115 studies looking at corruption's impact on economic growth by Ugur and Dasgupta. The application of principal-agent theory to the issue of corruption has taken for granted that principals have the 'will' to serve the functions of monitoring and keeping agents to account. Finally, this chapter concludes with thoughts on how future research can better explore how each theory could be used to better inform anti-corruption interventions.
