strategy (CAS) documents are now required to diagnose the state of governance and the risks that corruption poses to Bank projects.

The Comprehensive Development Framework unveiled in 1999 underscores the importance of governance and public sector institutional reform issues in the Bank's development assistance dialogue. The World Bank Institute has initiated courses on corruption for developing country officials and conducted surveys on service delivery. The Bank has also put a greater emphasis on institutional reform and capacity building through its lending program.

Bank assistance for intemational efforts to curtail corruption has been mainly in the form of sponsorship of major conferences, dissemination notes and support for the adoption of the 1999 OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions.

The impact of corruption on public service delivery performance and poverty alleviation is widely recognized (see e.g. Tomaszewska and Shah, 2000 for empirical evidence). A wide consensus has also recently emerged that corruption is a symptom of failed governance (see World Bank 2000) and hence curtailing corruption requires addressing the causes of mis-governance. Nevertheless, the menu of potential actions to curtail corruption is very large so a framework is needed that provides guidance on ordering potential actions. Prioritization of various actions depends on both the conceptual and empirical views of what works and what does not work in the context of particular countries. Such a framework is also needed for evaluating both Bank and country anticorruption programs. This note proposes a framework for such evaluations.

# **_A Simple Evaluation Framework_**

To focus attention on the corruption aspects of development programs, we use a framework based on the incentives for opportunistic behavior by public officials.<sup>3</sup> To distinguish between highly corrupt and largely corruption-free societies, consider the conditions that encourage public officials to seek out or accept corruption:

- The expected gains exceed the expected costs of undertaking a corrupt act.

- Little weight is placed on the cost that corruption imposes on others.

The first point is based on pure self-interest: corruption will only take place when officials expect to derive net positive benefit from the transaction. Successful anticorruption programs will lower the expected gains and raise the expected penalties of corrupt behavior. That is, anti-corruption programs must change the cost-benefit calculations of public officials who believe that the expected net benefits of corruption

> 3 A suggestion we received, based on an earlier version of this paper, was that we include the actions of private agents as well as public officials (the "demand side" for corruption in the case of bribery). We focus on the supply of corruption by public officials because a government that is unable to improve the incentives of its own employees is unlikely to affect private sector agents (i.e. demand can safely be thought of as constant in highly corrupt societies) since a government has significantly fewer policy actions for discouraging corruption by private agents than for discouraging corruption among public officials.

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