Open research questions in Corruption and Economic Development

What the literature leaves open

• Arising from the findings, the paper makes the following recommendations: 1. Institutionalise proactive disclosure. The National Assembly should adopt a standing rule requiring the automatic, itemised publication of its approved budget, disaggregated by head of expenditure, on its official website within thirty days of the passage of the Appropriation Act, rather than waiting for Freedom of Information Act requests or court orders. Publish a citizens' budget for the legislature. In line with international best practice reflected in the Open Budget Survey methodology, the National Assembly should produce and publish a simplified, non-technical "citizens' budget" summarising its own expenditure, to enable meaningful public understanding and participation. Strengthen internal oversight mechanisms. The National Assembly's Public Accounts Committee and equivalent internal oversight structures should be empowered and resourced to review and publicise the National Assembly's own expenditure with the same rigour applied to other federal agencies, reducing reliance on external litigation as the primary enforcement mechanism. Deepen civil society and media partnership. Government and the National Assembly should formalise structured engagement with civil society organisations such as SERAP, PLAC and BudgIT during budget formulation and implementation, rather than treating their interventions as adversarial, so as to institutionalise the kind of scrutiny that has, until now, been achieved largely through litigation. Judicial and legislative clarity on budget padding. The National Assembly, in collaboration with the Executive, should consider legislative clarification of the limits of legislative amendment power over the Appropriation Bill, to reduce the recurring ambiguity that has historically shielded padding allegations from definitive legal resolution. Implementing these recommendations would not, by itself, guarantee that budget transparency and accountability in the National Assembly moves decisively from myth toward reality, but it would address the specific practice gaps identified in this study and provide a more solid institutional foundation on which such a transition could occur. REFERENCES 1) Carthena Advisory. (2023). Transparency, public trust and investment climate in emerging economies. Carthena Advisory. 2) Fiscal Responsibility Act, 2007 (Nigeria). 3) Freedom of Information Act, 2011 (Nigeria). 4) Hood, C. (1991). A public management for all seasons? Public Administration, 69(1), 3–19. 5) Ibrahim, J. (2024, March 15). Padding as parliamentary criminality 101. Premium Times. https://www.premiumtimesng.com/opinion/677775-padding-as-parliamentary-criminality-101-by-jibrin-ibrahim.html International Budget Partnership. (2019). Open Budget Survey 2019: Nigeria.

  Budget Transparency and Accountability in Nigeria’s National Assembly: Myth or Reality · 2026 · DOI

• The recommendations are based on the findings and conclusions of the study and are beneficials to the following groups: Government Employees, Government Agencies, Regulatory Bodies and Oversights, and Future Researcher. 1. The Government Employees encourage to undergo a regular orientation and capacity-building programs to strengthen their knowledge on policies, procedures and ethical responsibilities. 2. As regards to Government Agencies, strengthening internal controls is highly encouraged to support effective and transparent operations. Adherence to the guidelines issued by the Commission on Audit (COA) and the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) is likewise promoted to ensure consistency and compliance. © 2026 The International Review of Multidisciplinary Research. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. 93 STRENGTHENING CASH HANDLING PRACTICES IN GOVERNMENT AGENCIES: INSIGHTS FROM EXTERNAL CERTIFIED PUBLIC The International Review of Multidisciplinary Research, Volume 1, Issue 9, 2026 3. In terms of Regulatory Bodies and Oversight Agencies, enhancing supervision and verification procedures over financial transactions is likewise recommended, alongside maintaining updated audit trails and comprehensive documentation logs, to help promote greater transparency and accountability. 4. Finally, Future Researchers are encouraged to broaden the scope of the study by increasing the sample size, ideally covering a wider area or the entire region, and to consider incorporating qualitative research methods, such as interviews, to gain deeper insights into issues related to fraud and regulatory non-compliance.

  Strengthening Cash Handling Practices in Government Agencies: Insights from External Certified Public Accountant · 2026 · DOI

• Brown, M. E., Treviño, L. K., & Harrison, D. A. (2005). Ethical leadership: A social learning construct development and testing. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 97(2), 117–134. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2005.03.00 2 for Castro, C., & Lopes, I. C. (2023).

  The Capability Paradox: When Competence Becomes a Risk in Public Leadership · 2026 · DOI

• (cid:127) Government should strengthen merit-based recruitment and promotion systems in public institutions. (cid:127) Continuous training and capacity-building programs should be provided for public servants. Ikeanyibe, O. M. (2023). Public administration and public policy in Nigeria. Enugu, Nigeria: Rhyce Kerex Publishers. Nnoli, O. (2022). Introduction to politics (2nd ed.). Enugu, Nigeria: Snaap Press. Olaopa, T. (2022). Public administration and civil service reforms in Nigeria. Ibadan, Nigeria: John Archers Publishers. Olowu, D. (2022). Bureaucracy and democratic reforms in Africa. African Journal of Political Science, 6(1), 1–20. Pollitt, C., & Bouckaert, G. (2024). Public management reform: A comparative analysis (3rd ed.). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. United Nations Development Programme. (2015). Governance for sustainable development. New York, NY: UNDP. Weber, M. (1947). The theory of social and economic organization. New York, NY: Free Press. World Bank. (2020). Enhancing government effectiveness and transparency: The fight against corruption. Washington, DC: World Bank. (cid:127) Anti-corruption agencies should be empowered to investigate and prosecute corrupt practices effectively. Yamamoto, H. (2023). New public management: Japan's practice. Institute for International Policy Studies Journal, 12(3), 1–15. (cid:127) Public institutions should adopt modern ICT systems to improve efficiency and transparency. (cid:127) Adequate funding should be provided to enable responsibilities perform their to institutions effectively. (cid:127) Bureaucratic procedures should be simplified to reduce delays and improve service accessibility. (cid:127) Performance be strengthened to ensure accountability and productivity. evaluation systems should (cid:127) Citizens should be encouraged to participate in monitoring public service delivery. (cid:127) Government should ensure policy consistency and institutional stability. (cid:127) Public sector reforms should be regularly reviewed and updated to address emerging challenges. BIBLIOGRAPHIE Adamolekun, L. (2020). Public administration in Africa: Main issues and selected country studies. Ibadan, Nigeria: Spectrum Books. Adebayo, A. (2024). Principles and practice of public administration in Nigeria. Lagos, Nigeria: Spectrum Books. Drucker, P. F. (2017). Management: Tasks, responsibilities and practices. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Ezeani, E. O. (2016). Fundamentals of public administration. Enugu, Nigeria: Snaap Press. Federal Republic of Nigeria. (2017). Economic recovery and growth plan 2017–2020. Abuja, Nigeria: Government Printer. © 2026 IJSSASS. All rights reserved.

  Administrative Efficiency and Service Delivery in Public Institutions in Nigeria · 2026 · DOI

• We chose a general marketing course, not tailored to the Vietnamese context, because of previous work discussing the mixed results of these programs. Insufficient evidence of the mechanisms and effect heterogeneity reduces our ability to generalize to larger populations of emerging market businesses, because we do not know which specific attributes of bribe paying propensity to look for among other firms and in other settings. This was also confirmed by qualitative evidence from IC course participants who still encountered bribery requests after the class, including the owner of Nam Thang, who admitted in an interview that their regulatory improvements were insufficient and, “Our restaurant had to pay unofficial expenses, including during special inspections, regular inspections, where business prepared gifts.

  Do better managers bribe less? Cross-national and experimental evidence · 2026 · DOI

• There are several avenues for future research. The immediate question is to improve the constant factor in Theorem 5.1; this will require new ideas. Further, it would be interesting to extend our results to the setting where the principal solves an arbitrary combinatorial optimization problem on the agents, and when agent values can be multi-dimensional. As an example, each agent can control a subset of edges in a graph, whose cost they seek to signal to the principal, while the principal seeks to compute a minimum spanning tree on these edges. Another example is the price discrimination setting in the work of Bergemann, Brooks, and Morris [2015]. Finally, it would be interesting to explore PoA for other models of information revelation beyond signaling, for instance, models where the agents themselves are uncertain about their values [Roesler and Szentes, 2017]. 19The current parameters are set with ϕ · τ = α, we can jitter the parameters a bit to achieve ϕ · τ > α as required. So the PoA bound can be arbitrarily close to 11 + 5 √ 5.

  The Price of Competitive Information Disclosure · 2026 · DOI

• Appendices A PoA of a Discretized Game A.1 A Restricted Signaling Model.. A.2 Main Result for Restricted Signaling Spaces........ B PoA of a Noisy Selection Game. B.1 Model and Preliminaries... Signaling scheme re-formalization.... B.1.1 B.1.2 Noisy Selection and Utilities... B.2 Existence of Nash Equilibrium.. B.3 PoA Upper Bound..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

  The Price of Competitive Information Disclosure · 2026 · DOI

• Further limitations should be noted. First, the study reflects judicial visibility rather than corruption incidence, due to its reliance on publicly available adjudicative documents. Second, coding based on legal texts offers limited insight into motivations, organizational processes, or transaction networks. Third, typical cases are context-dependent and should not be overgeneralized. Future research should integrate audit, insurance supervision, and procurement-platform data strengthen external validity. Accordingly, annual distributions are presented as publication-year patterns of judicial visibility, not as incidence estimates or policyeffect measures.

  Reforming the white coat economy: judicial evidence and institutional implications from China’s healthcare anti-corruption campaign · 2026 · DOI

• Several limitations warrant acknowledgment before presenting results. The cross-sectional design precludes causal inference. The observed associations may reflect reverse causality, as citizens with lower well-being might perceive more corruption, or omitted variables that jointly influence corruption perception, well-being, and residential location. City size as a proxy does not isolate spe- cific governance mechanisms. Self-reported measures of both corruption perception and well-being are subject to various response biases. The analysis cannot distinguish among types of corruption or Volume 12 Issue 1 (2026)V. 12 Polish Journalof Political Science Beyond Transparency: How Governance Complexity Shapes Corruption’s Political Consequences 36 identify effects of specific governance instruments such as public-private partnerships. These limi- tations are addressed not through methodological solutions, which are unavailable given the data, but through interpretive caution. The contribution lies in identifying patterns consistent with the theoretical framework rather than establishing definitive causal effects.

  Beyond Transparency: How Governance Complexity Shapes Corruption’s Political Consequences · 2026 · DOI

• The analysis faces limitations that circumscribe the conclusions that can be drawn and point toward directions for future research. The cross-sectional design cannot establish causation, and the associations observed may reflect selection, reverse causality, or omitted variables. Citizens with lower well-being may be more likely to perceive corruption, or unobserved factors may jointly determine corruption perception, well-being, and residential location. Future research employing panel data, natural experiments, or instrumental variable strategies could provide stronger causal evidence for the proposed mechanism. The measurement of governance complexity through city size is admittedly coarse. City size correlates with institutional scale but does not isolate specific features such as agency count, contracting prevalence, or principal-agent chain length. Future research with direct measures of governance arrangements at the local level could identify which dimensions of complexity most strongly affect legibility. Administrative data on municipal governance structures, merged with individuallevel survey data, would enable more precise tests of the theoretical mechanism. The analysis cannot distinguish among types of corruption or identify effects of specific governance instruments. Whether the patterns observed apply equally to grand and petty corruption, to corruption in service delivery versus regulatory contexts, or to particular institutional forms such as public-private partnerships remains unknown. Disaggregated analyses focusing on specific governance arrangements and corruption types would strengthen understanding of when and how legibility deficits arise. Finally, the mechanism itself remains unobserved. The analysis tests implications of the legibility framework rather than directly measuring attribution capacity or remediation attempts. Survey experiments manipulating information about governance complexity and measuring attribution accuracy could provide more direct evidence. Qualitative research exploring how citizens actually attempt to pursue accountability when they perceive corruption would illuminate the remediation failure mechanism proposed here. Volume 12 Issue 1 (2026)V.

  Beyond Transparency: How Governance Complexity Shapes Corruption’s Political Consequences · 2026 · DOI

• FDI produces mixed results: it boosts economic institutions in the short term but can weaken them when linked to rent-seeking and weak law enforcement environments.

  The nexus of FDI, trade, and institutional quality: a panel data analysis of RCEP countries · 2025 · DOI

• Although multiple anti-corruption strategies have been introduced, including strengthening internal oversight regimes, prosecuting corrupt individuals, fostering international cooperation, and recognising reform initiatives, their practical impact on governance outcomes remains insufficiently explored.

  Effect of Anti-Corruption Strategies on Governance of the Kenya National Police Service in Meru County, Kenya · 2025 · DOI

• This approach is insufficient because it does not address situations where corruption is a central element of the governance model, as a result of becoming a key factor in the decision-making process in public institutions and private organizations at the local, regional, national and international levels.

  The Case for Considering Corruption as a Central Element of Governance: Institutional and Organizational Corruption and Complex Corruption Networks · 2025 · DOI

• In addition to highlighting the significance of collaborative efforts and the exchange of ideas between different policy actors, the study contributes to the ACF literature by unpacking the role of advocacy coalitions in an understudied and underrepresented context.

  Advocacy coalitions and the co‐production of anti‐corruption policy in Botswana: A discourse network analysis · 2025 · DOI

• There is no single definition for corruption and in this case it is limited to the corruption practices of white-collar crime, being a link to institutional organized crime, with confirmation of the suspicion of crime in the Prosecutor's Office - especially that of serious crimes which is the main pillar of the state in this right to enforce the law and fight the phenomenon, as well as the state courts.

  WHITE COLLAR CRIME AS ORGANIZED INSTITUTIONAL CRIME · 2024 · DOI

• The article raises the need for further studies into causal mechanisms of size by including more small states into international comparative research, turning attention to qualitative comparative studies, and taking a closer look at the link between socio-cultural factors of corruption and country size.

  Corruption and country size · 2024 · DOI

• Furthermore, we present new systematic data set that reveals a substantial increase in the conviction of former heads of government for corruption since 2000, underscoring the importance of the phenomenon and highlighting the need for further research into the politics of criminal accountability.

  Convicting Politicians for Corruption: The Politics of Criminal Accountability · 2024 · DOI

• The work also stresses the importance that reforming anti-corruption institutions and policies in countries with systemic corruption might have, an understudied subject in the literature —due to the literature’s “structural bent”, that is, an excessive focus on the economic, political-economic, and democratic structures that contribute to the control of corruption.

  Un modelo de choques e interrupciones de reforma anticorrupción: Evidencia del caso mexicano. · 2020 · DOI

• Primary research on anti-corruption strategies in health sectors in AWA remains scarce, with recommendations to curb corrupt practices often drawn from personal views and experience rather that of rigorous studies.

  Corruption in Anglophone West Africa health systems: a systematic review of its different variants and the factors that sustain them · 2019 · DOI

• After surveying a variety of good practices for eliminating corruption in public procurement in Europe, this paper concludes that the new rules have produced mixed results, with the most unfavourable outcomes occurring in Central and Eastern European countries where public procurement corruption is more virulent than elsewhere in Europe.

  An overview of European good practices in public procurement · 2016

• Based on the findings of the analysis, the authors outline an agenda for future research on government transparency and its effects that calls for more systematically investigating the ways in which contextual conditions shape transparency outcomes, replicating studies with varying methodologies, investigating transparency in neglected countries, and paying greater attention to understudied claims of transparency such as improved decision making and management .

  25 Years of Transparency Research: Evidence and Future Directions · 2016 · DOI

• The results suggest that the presence of a number of criminogenic conditions such as banks that are too big to fail, a high level of inequality and free market principles is positively related to the severity of the crisis in the European Union, whereas mixed evidence is found for high levels of bribery.

  Criminogenic conditions, bribery and the economic crisis in the EU: A macro level analysis · 2015 · DOI

• Corruption is a very underreported offence, as victims have the feeling that the authorities do not care about corruption: why report? An extensive statistical analysis of corruption cases handled by the prosecution and the court showed that the camera obscura metaphor had to be refined: apart from being opaque, the law enforcement institutions behave like a random box.

  Serbian anti-corruption policy: Welcome to Potemkin’s village? · 2013 · DOI

• Does perceived corruption in recipient countries reduce support for foreign aid in donor countries? This under-explored yet salient question is examined using the 2009 Eurobarometer survey for the 27 EU countries.

  Does Corruption Cause Aid Fatigue? Public Opinion and the Aid-Corruption Paradox¹ · 2013 · DOI

• The intangible rights and services conception of fraud codified therein was recognized, but limited, by the Supreme Court in Skilling1 But many of the interpretive questions traditionally raised and debated in common law fraud cases remain to be answered.

  The Commonwealth's Right to "Honest Services": Prosecuting Public Corruption in Massachusetts · 2013

Most-cited papers in Corruption and Economic Development

• Sources of Corruption: A Cross-Country Study · British Journal of Political Science · 2001 · 394 citations
• 25 Years of Transparency Research: Evidence and Future Directions · Public Administration Review · 2016 · 377 citations
• Transparency is not Enough: Making Transparency Effective in Reducing Corruption · International Political Science Review · 2010 · 323 citations
• The New Economics of Corruption: A Survey and some New Results · Political Studies · 1997 · 208 citations
• China’s Anticorruption Campaign and Entrepreneurship · The Journal of Law and Economics · 2021 · 164 citations
• Attribution And Accountability: Voting for roads in Ghana · World Politics · 2015 · 145 citations
• Constraining Governments: New Indices of Vertical, Horizontal, and Diagonal Accountability · American Political Science Review · 2020 · 130 citations
• Examining E-Government development effects on corruption in Africa: The mediating effects of ICT development and institutional quality · Technology in Society · 2020 · 123 citations
• Political connection, corporate philanthropy and efficiency: Evidence from China’s anti-corruption campaign · Journal of Comparative Economics · 2020 · 122 citations
• Electronic government and corruption: Systematic literature review, framework, and agenda for future research · Technological Forecasting and Social Change · 2021 · 120 citations

Most recent work

• Enhancing Public Management Through Integrity and Organizational Citizenship Behavior: A Systematic Review · International Journal of Public Administration · 2026
• Professional Colonialism: Notarial Monopolies as Instruments of Institutional Capture in Postcolonial Territories · Public Administration and Development · 2026
• Implementation of International Anti-Corruption Standards into Ukrainian Legislation · International Criminal Law Review · 2026
• Innovative Methodologies for Measuring and Analysing Corruption Risk · Belügyi Szemle · 2026
• Investigative Journalism in the Nigerian Press: Strong Watchdogs, Weak Investigators? · African Journalism Studies · 2026
• Beyond Transparency: How Governance Complexity Shapes Corruption’s Political Consequences · Polish Journal of Political Science · 2026
• Executive’s Bossiness Versus Legislative Oversight Functions: Implications for Effective Governance and Democratic Consolidation in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic · International Journal of innovative inventions in Social Science and Humanities · 2026
• Governance quality, corruption, and economic growth: global insights from two decades · SN Business & Economics · 2026
• Policy implementation Gaps in Developing Democracies: an Examination into Bureaucratic Politics of Corruption · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026
• Bureaucratic Discretion and Corruption Risks in African Public Administration: Power, Agency, and Structural Change · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026

Related topics in Social Sciences