Tag Archives: Robert Klitgaard

New Podcast Episode, Featuring Robert Klitgaard

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. In this episode, host Dan Hough interviews Professor Robert Klitgaard, one of the most well-known and influential academics in the corruption field. In the conversation, Professor Klitgaard talks us through the origins of his ideas in applying institutional economic theory to understanding corruption issues, as originally set out in his 1980 book Controlling Corruption. He then discusses several other issues, including challenges related to elitism in developing and developed countries, the role of “culture” in anticorruption analysis, and his recent research in Bhutan and the lessons it might hold for other countries pursuing anticorruption reforms. You can also find both this episode and an archive of prior episodes at the following locations: KickBack was originally founded as a collaborative effort between GAB and the Interdisciplinary Corruption Research Network (ICRN). It is now hosted and managed by the University of Sussex’s Centre for the Study of Corruption. If you like it, please subscribe/follow, and tell all your friends!

Klitgaard’s Misleading “Corruption Formula”

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I guess I’m engaging in the “ritual slaying of the elders” in which professors often indulge. Having gone after Paolo Mauro in an earlier post, here I want to take on (a small part) of Robert Klitgaard’s work.

Klitgaard, who is one of the giants of academic anticorruption research over the last half-century, once pithily (and influentially) summed up his perspective on the causes of corruption in a “corruption formula”: C = M + D – A, or (to put this back into words): “Corruption equals monopoly plus discretion minus accountability.”  (The formula originally appeared in Klitgaard’s 1975 1988 book, Controlling Corruption.  You can find a more recent version here.)  Much as I respect Klitgaard’s work, I think this anticorruption “formula” is not merely trite, but affirmatively misleading and therefore dangerous.

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