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The movement toward decentralization is gathering momentum. In this context, the important costs of corruption are being explicitly recognised, as is the urgent need to prevent corruption, raise city revenues, improve service delivery, stimulate...

Increasing awareness of the importance of governance has been accompanied by an increase in the number of commercial firms and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) producing broad indicators of the quality of governance and public institutions. First...

A recent World Bank programme in Campo Elias, Venezuela, used an innovative and effective approach to build participatory institutional frameworks and to apply best practices in public policy making. As a result, corruption has fallen and services...

The 1999 Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS) assesses in detail the various dimensions of governance from the perspective of about 3000 firms in 20 countries. After introducing the survey framework and measurement approach...

At the request of the Royal Government of Cambodia, The World Bank supervised diagnostic surveys of public officials, citizens and enterprises in Cambodia in November and December 1999. The study shows that citizens, enterprises and households are...

The key to reduced poverty is an integrated approach to development, addressing quality growth, environment, education, health and governance. This paper argues that government, as the key determinant of a county's domestic and international...

Why is corruption - defined here as the misuse of public office for private gain - perceived to be more widespread in some countries than others? Different theories associate cross-national variation in the extent of corruption with particular...

This report puts into motion a chain of events that fundamentally reformed the way the Bank thinks about, and acts against, corruption. In its first part, it thus details the progress that the Bank has made building each of the four pillars of its...

Corruption ranks, together with effective democratic representation, as the most important problem facing local governments. The challenge facing local governments is to develop innovative ways of building effective, accountable, and transparent...

This paper explores the effect of donor-supported civic education programs on levels of citizen trust in institutions in the Dominican Republic. Using attitudinal surveys of control and treatment groups the paper demonstrates that civic education had...