With the aim of providing a comprehensive analysis of institutions, and of the global economy more generally, this volume explores systems of institutions and the effect of corruption, developments in behavioural economics, the impact of immigration, and the links between democratic progress and economic growth.

This book considers how emerging economies around the world face the challenge of building good institutions and effective governance, since so much of economic development depends on having these in place. The promotion of shared prosperity and the battle against poverty require interventions to reach out to the poor and the disadvantaged. Yet time and again we have seen such effort foild or diminished by corruption and leakage. The creation of good governance and institutions and structures to combat corruption require determination and passion but also intricate design rooted in data, analysis, and research. In this book, leading researchers from around the world bring to the table some of the best available ideas to help create better governance structures, design laws for corruption control, and nurture good institutions.

Analysts and policymakers often decry the failure of institutions to accomplish their stated purpose. Bringing together leading scholars of Latin American politics, this volume helps us understand why. The volume offers a conceptual and theoretical framework for studying weak institutions. It introduces different dimensions of institutional weakness and explores the origins and consequences of that weakness. Drawing on recent research on constitutional and electoral reform, executive-legislative relations, property rights, environmental and labor regulation, indigenous rights, squatters and street vendors, and anti-domestic violence laws in Latin America, the volume's chapters show us that politicians often design institutions that they cannot or do not want to enforce or comply with. Challenging existing theories of institutional design, the volume helps us understand the logic that drives the creation of weak institutions, as well as the conditions under which they may be transformed into institutions that matter.

Corruption has been a feature of public institutions for centuries yet only relatively recently has it been made the subject of sustained scientific analysis. Lambsdorff shows how insights from institutional economics can be used to develop a better understanding of why corruption occurs and the best policies to combat it. He argues that rather than being deterred by penalties, corrupt actors are more influenced by other factors such as the opportunism of their criminal counterparts and the danger of acquiring an unreliable reputation. This suggests a novel strategy for fighting corruption similar to the invisible hand that governs competitive markets. This strategy - the 'invisible foot' - shows that the unreliability of corrupt counterparts induces honesty and good governance even in the absence of good intentions. Combining theoretical research with state-of-the-art empirical investigations, this book will be an invaluable resource for researchers and policy-makers concerned with anti-corruption reform.

Much of the devastation caused by the recent earthquake in Turkey was the result of widespread corruption between the construction industry and government officials. Corruption is part of everyday public life and we tend to take it for granted. However, preventing corruption helps to raise city revenues, improve service delivery, stimulate public confidence and participation, and win elections. This book is designed to help citizens and public officials diagnose, investigate and prevent various kinds of corrupt and illicit behaviour. It focuses on systematic corruption rather than the free-lance activity of a few law-breakers, and emphasises practical preventive measures rather than purely punitive or moralistic campaigns.

This Element introduces the concept of institutional weakness, arguing that weakness or strength is a function of the extent to which an institution actually matters to social, economic or political outcomes. It then presents a typology of three forms of institutional weakness: insignificance, in which rules are complied with but do not affect the way actors behave; non-compliance, in which state elites either choose not to enforce the rules or fail to gain societal cooperation with them; and instability, in which the rules are changed at an unusually high rate. The Element then examines the sources of institutional weakness.

Corruption is usually understood as hampering political development, economic growth and democratic participation of citizens, but comparing the effects of corruption for different political regimes presents astonishingly complex findings. The ongoing persistence of corruption underlines that it is not only dysfunctional, but can be highly functional as well. This special issue brings together contributions from comparative politics, political science and economics which precisely focus on these (dys) functionalities of corruption in political regimes across various world regions. The question of methodological pluralism is especially important for studying corruption comparatively. While on an international level a trend towards an increased use of quantitative methods in political science as well as in economics can be observed, the special issue underlines the importance of having a pluralistic approach for grasping the complex and multi-layered effects of the phenomenon. Of similar importance is the adoption of a comparative perspective that includes different world regions in order to understand the different roles of corruption in developing, transforming and developed countries alike. Dr. Tobias Debiel is Director of the Centre for Global Cooperation Research and of the Institute for Development and Peace (INEF). Since 2006, he is also Professor in International Relations and Development Policy, Institute of Political Science, University of Duisburg-Essen. Dr. Andrea Gawrich is Professor for International Integration at the University of Gießen.