ABSTRACT

The causes and effects of corruption, and how to combat corruption, are issues that are increasingly on the national and international agenda of politicians and other policy makers. For example, the World Bank has relatively recently come around to the view that economic development is closely linked to corruption reduction.2 By contrast, the concept of corruption has not received much attention. Existing conceptual work on corruption consists in little more than the presentation of brief definitions of corruption as a preliminary to extended accounts of the causes and effects of corruption and the ways to combat it. Moreover, most of these definitions of corruption are unsatisfactory in fairly obvious ways.