Bill Gates on Corruption in Development Projects: Is This How He Ran Microsoft? (Part I)

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The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has emerged as a major force in the development community – thanks not only to the $28 billion (yes, billion) the Foundation has donated to improve the lives of the world’s poor, but to the license it gives co-chair Bill Gates to speak to development policy. After all, as they used to say of the brokerage firm E.F. Hutton, when a billionaire speaks, people listen — particularly one who gives billions away each year.

Not surprisingly, the letter he and spouse Melinda wrote to serve as the Foundation’s 2014 annual report has been the subject of much attention — excerpted in the Wall Street Journal, quoted in hundreds of press stories and blogs. For the most part, the attention is welcome; the letter nicely puts the lie to several myths that pervade the discussion of poverty and development.  But in a section Microsoft’s founder wrote slaying some common myths about foreign aid, he perpetuates another myth, one that is a major hurdle to more effective aid programs: that corruption in these programs, though undesirable, is relatively minor and manageable. That’s just not true. Continue reading →

Bibliography on Corruption and Anticorruption

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As part of my research on corruption and anticorruption, I’ve been compiling a bibliography of sources — articles, books, working papers, reports, etc.  The current version of the bibliography, which includes over 2,300 sources, is available on my faculty webpage.  (To link directly to the bibliography, click here.)  I try to update the bibliography every month or so.  Despite its considerable length, I’m sure I’m missing a lot of important material, and of course new stuff appears all the time.  If you have suggestions for things to add, you can send them to me through the Contact page.

Welcome to the Global Anticorruption Blog

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Welcome to the Global Anticorruption Blog. This blog is a forum for analysis and discussion of the problem of corruption, particularly (though not exclusively) public or political corruption around the world. While “corruption” has a range of different meanings, our intended focus is on a set of familiar activities — including bribery, extortion, embezzlement, nepotism, and related conduct — that entail the abuse of entrusted power for private gain. Corruption has become a high-profile, high-stakes topic in international development, and figuring out the best strategies to combat corruption is a high priority for governments, international organizations, advocacy organizations, and scholars.

The Global Anticorruption Blog is intended to facilitate interaction between the academic, policy, and advocacy communities. Such interaction is important to ensure both that policy initiatives are based on the best available research, and also to promote scholarship that is relevant to pressing real-world challenges. This blog also aims to promote the sharing of information and insights across disciplinary boundaries, so that scholars and practitioners with a range of professional backgrounds – in law, politics, economics, business, public management, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and more – can learn from one another and work together in pursuit of the common goal of promoting effective anticorruption strategies. Our goal is to foster discussion and debate that is rigorous, vigorous, and constructive.

To this end, my co-blogger Rick Messick and I, along with participants in the Harvard Law School Global Anticorruption Lab, will post our perspectives on recent articles, news stories, legal cases, policy initiatives, and other material related to global anticorruption.  We will occasionally try to be provocative, and we may often be wrong, but we hope that our posts will be able to spark productive conversations.  Thank you for visiting, and we hope you will participate in the conversations!