“spring-cleaning”

Many countries launch periodic
“spring-cleaning” through anticorruption
campaigns. How effective are they?
It varies from situation to situation. To
be effective, they have to be credible
and sustained. As suggested by the frequency-
dependent equilibrium models,
a critical mass of opportunist individuals
have to be convinced over a long
enough period that corruption is not cost
effective. But as has happened many
times in the recent history of Africa or

China, anticorruption campaigns are
usually ad hoc, and targeted at political
enemies or at best at small fry, exempting
the big fish, or the important cronies
and accomplices of the political
rulers. Short-lived campaigns and repeated
amnesties to offenders (designed
to wipe the slate clean) only increase
the cynicism about the next
round and give out the wrong signals.
As we have discussed in connection
with Tirole’s (1996) intertemporal collective
reputation model, trust takes
several periods to reestablish itself. What
is important is to institutionalize various
kinds of accountability mechanisms (like
an independent office of public auditing,
an election commission to limit and
enforce rules on campaign contributions
in democratic elections, independent
investigating agencies (like the Hong
Kong Independent Committee against
Corruption which directly reports to the
Governor General), an office of local
ombudsman with some control over the
bureaucracy, citizens’ watchdog committees
providing information and monitoring
services and pursuing public-interest
litigation, a vigorous and independent,
even muckraking, press, less stringent
libel laws or laws protecting official secrecy,
etc.).14 For the watchdog committees
it is important not merely to unearth
and publicize egregious cases of
public corruption, but also to highlight
credible cases where the automatic and
cynical presumption of the local people
that the officials are corrupt turns out
to be gross exaggerations, thus cutting
down on the feedback effects of rumors
and designs of middlemen.
Many other measures of reform
within public administration have been
suggested: cutting down on the proliferating
functions of government departments
(using vouchers and competition
with private suppliers to serve a public
need when customers can “vote” with
their feet) and concentrating these
functions largely in areas where, on account
of elements of natural monopoly
or a public good or quality standards
not easily discernible to the customers,
a voucher plan is not an efficient
way of providing the service; making supervisors
answerable for gross acts of
malfeasance by their subordinates; wellestablished
procedures of encouraging
“whistle-blowers” and guaranteeing
their anonymity; authorization of periodic
probing of ostensible but “unexplainable
assets” of officials; working in
teams (for example, in Singapore customs
agents were asked to work in
pairs) when lower bureaucrats face a
customer instead of one-on-one so that
there is some check in the bargaining
process (this is a simpler form of the
overlapping jurisdictions case discussed
above); well-defined career paths in
civil service that are not dependent on
the incumbent politicians’ favor; periodic
job rotation so that a bureaucrat
does not become too cosy with a customer
over a long period; a more elaborate
codification of civil service rules
reducing the official’s discretion in
granting favors; and so on. Of course, in
many of these cases one can also argue
on the opposite side. Too many rules
rather than discretion may have the perverse
effect of providing opportunities
for corruption simply to circumvent
mindless inflexibilities. The practice of
frequent job rotation may provide an incentive
to officials for maximum loot15
in the shortest possible time, discourage

ing on the job, and in general provide
the politician (or the senior officer) a
weapon to transfer an honest official
bent on rocking the boat of existing patronage
distribution. The opportunity to
probe the private finances of an official
is sometimes abused against rivals and
political opponents. Working on teams in
facing a customer may sometimes encourage
unnecessary delays or collusion
in demands for larger bribes. And so on.