Content area
Full Text
This special issue is concerned with the emergence or re-emergence of corruption as a prominent and significant issue in developing countries in the 1990s. This new significance has several aspects: a flood of articles, books and reports; keen interest from donor countries and international financial institutions; and new efforts to limit and reduce corruption. This upsurge of interest and concern, the so-called `corruption eruption', has encouraged new thinking about the nature of corruption and the effects it has on political and economic systems. The articles selected here are concerned to analyse the meaning of corruption, to assess its significance and to examine how it arises and the roles it plays in different political and economic systems. The country studies are drawn from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America and, while not comprehensive, they identify and illustrate key issues in understanding and explaining corruption in contemporary political life.
In the 1960s arguments were advanced that suggested that corruption could assist development by facilitating capital formation and hence investment. This benign view of corruption has now given way to a new consensus which holds that, far from contributing to development, corruption damages economic growth, distorts investment and has a particularly severe impact on the poorest groups in Third World societies. The subject is not only receiving more attention than it once did but its importance in understanding the political economy of development is now more widely appreciated.
Corruption has become a high-profile, high-priority topic in the space of the last 10 years. It is perhaps no coincidence that corruption rose to prominence at the same time as the Cold War ended. The sudden endgame to what many had thought to be a...