This is my project during the 2013 summer internship at the Asian Development Bank. I worked at the Independent Evaluation Deparment, assessing the Bank's approach to governance and corruption in the context of the latest development research.

Included are the full report and relevant code.

While corruption is a classic collective action problem, prevalent anti-corruption initiatives are dominated by a principal-agent framework. Our current effort does not pay sufficient attention to facilitating collective action—-in other words, building the political will to enforce reform—-leading to widespread implementation gap. The paper discusses two case studies of ADB member countries, Indonesia and Vietnam, to illustrate the importance of political will in anti-corruption efforts. Aware that it is difficult for the ADB to get involved in political matters, the paper proposes the Indicators and Benchmarks strategy as a technical approach to solving a political problem. The last section concludes and emphasizes that this strategy is not yet another new tool to directly “cure” corruption. Rather, it is a change in mindset, geared towards cultivating an enabling environment for the people to fight against corruption themselves.