Rethinking Corruption: An Empirical Governance Perspective

NRGI president and CEO Daniel Kaufmann delivered the keynote presentation at “Transparencia: Open Data and Anticorruption in Latin America,” an April 4 symposium at Harvard University.
 
Kaufmann offered a framework to rethink and redefine the conventional view of corruption. Showing global evidence, he addressed various governance dimensions that matter and their impact on growth and development. He talked about the challenge of “state capture” and of “legal corruption,” among other topics. Legal corruption is in the spotlight after the massive data leak on offshore companies known as the Panama Papers, which his presentation also covered.
 
Kaufmann drew a number of relevant implications for major upcoming global events on anticorruption, including OECD Integrity Week in Paris in April and the U.K. Global Summit on Anti-Corruption in May.
 
Kaufmann also outlined the contours of Latin America’s wide, encompassing networks of corruption in this August 2015 article in Finance & Development, a quarterly magazine published by the IMF.
 
The symposium, held by Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, in collaboration with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, convened leading experts from nongovernmental organizations, government and civil society to discuss the factors that lead to corruption in the region and to explore specific efforts to combat the phenomenon.