In the end we were left with two very different senses. On the one hand, there has been
a revolution in the measurement of corruption, and this has in turn led to a blossoming of the academic literature on corruption. On the other hand, if we were asked by a politician
seeking to make his country eligible for Millennium Challenge aid or the head of an anticorruption
agency what guidance the economic literature could give them about how to
tackle the problem, we realized that, beyond a few core economic principles, we had more
questions to pose than concrete answers.