Last month the Quality of Government (QoG) Institute at the University of Gothenburg published a working paper of mine, entitled Corruption as a Self-Reinforcing “Trap”: Implications for Reform Strategy, as part of their QoG working paper series. Here’s the abstract:

Corruption is widely believed to be a self-reinforcing phenomenon, in the sense that the incentive to engage in corrupt acts increases as corruption becomes more widespread in the relevant community. Leading scholars have argued that corruption’s self-reinforcing property implies that incremental anticorruption reforms cannot be effective, and that the only way to escape a high-corruption equilibrium “trap” is through a so-called “big bang” or “big push.” This widespread view is mistaken. After surveying the reasons corruption might be self-reinforcing (or in some cases self-limiting), this paper demonstrates that corruption’s self-reinforcing property does not imply the necessity of a “big bang” approach to reform, and indeed may strengthen the case for pursuing sustained, cumulative incremental anticorruption reforms.

I hope that some readers might find the paper to be of interest. Constructive criticism and other feedback are of course most welcome!