Chapter 19: Corruption

Paul Heywood

Corruption After decades during which corruption received relatively little attention from academics and political practitioners alike, there was a veritable explosion of interest in the issue after the end of the Cold War. Not only did corruption scandals become major news stories in both the developed and developing worlds, but a consensus began to emerge amongst both anti-corruption activists and western governments alike that corruption represented a major risk to socio-economic progress and development. Indeed, there is a sense in which corruption replaced another ‘c-word’ as the major threat facing western democracies, a view most explicitly expressed by the controversial former governor of the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz, when he called corruption the ‘greatest evil facing the world since communism’ (Wintour and Leigh, 2005). Certainly, a range of international organizations, including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), as well as ...

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