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The purpose of this paper is to identify the five mistakes made by political leaders in Asian countries in combating corruption. These mistakes constitute the cycle of failure which must be broken for Asian countries to succeed in fighting corruption.

This paper is based on the comparative evaluation of the effectiveness of the anti-corruption measures adopted by various Asian countries.

The cycle of failure in combating corruption in Asian countries arises from their governments’ reliance on corrupt political leaders and the police, and multiple anti-corruption agencies as attack dogs or paper tigers.

This paper would be of interest to those policymakers, anti-corruption practitioners, and scholars, who are concerned with enhancing the effectiveness of anti-corruption strategies in their countries by breaking the cycle of failure.

To show that establishing an anti-corruption agency (ACA), by itself, is not likely to be a successful anti-corruption strategy. Instead, a solid base of social trust, participation, and support is just as essential as creating an ACA with significant powers and resources.

This is a historical review of the origins and development of the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) of Hong Kong, and an assessment of its three-pronged approach strategy at both strategic and tactical levels.

An ACA requires broad and deep social support and participation if it is to succeed. That the ICAC remains nearly unique in developing such a base of support provides important lessons for those countries with ineffective ACAs.

A reassessment of the ICAC after a half-century shows that the Hong Kong case, despite its familiarity, has much to teach us if we understand it in its broadest implications.

This paper aims at comparing and contrasting the Ao Man-long scandal with the Ho Chio-meng case in Macau, drawing lessons from the two events and casting lights on the literature on corruption scandals.

The study used documentary research and interpretative and analytical approaches.

The two cases show considerable administrative discretion on the part of the principal officials involved, and remedial measures along the line of having more rigorous and frequent internal auditing may be necessary.

Original analyses were conducted together with literature review and documentary research. This paper would be of interest to scholars and practitioners concerned with how Macau combats corruption.

This paper analyses the importance of leadership and culture in combating corruption in Hong Kong SAR, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore and Taiwan.

This paper is based on the comparative analysis of the effectiveness of the anti-corruption measures in the studies of six selected countries/regions in this special issue of Public Administration and Policy. The contributors in this special issue were invited because of their publications on combating corruption in the six countries/regions.

The critical variable ensuring the effectiveness of combating corruption is the strong political will of the leadership in changing the culture of corruption in the country/region by implementing a zero-tolerance policy toward corruption, as shown in Singapore and Hong Kong. In New Zealand’s case, leadership plays a less important role because of the population’s emphasis on equality and egalitarianism and its reliance on the Ombudsman and Serious Fraud Office to curb corruption. However, the corrupt leadership of Tanaka Kakuei in Japan, Najib Rajak in Malaysia, and Chen Shui-bian in Taiwan, demonstrates clearly their insidious impact of consolidating their kleptocratic rule in these countries/regions.

As the role of leadership and culture in combating corruption has not been given sufficient attention in the literature, this paper attempts to rectify this neglect by demonstrating that the political leaders in Singapore and Hong Kong, and to a lesser extent, New Zealand, have succeeded in minimising corruption while their counterparts in Japan, Taiwan and Malaysia, have failed to do so.

The purpose of this paper is to study the uneven geographies of corruption on the African continent. Corruption is an entrenched part of African political culture. However, the degree and impacts of corruption vary widely across the continent, ranging from failed states such as Somalia to the region’s bright spot Botswana. This paper first defines corruption and discusses its causes and effects. It then delves into the specifics of African corruption, including its causes and effects such as patrimonial political cultures, clientelism and the role of natural resource exports.

The study uses data from Transparency International to assess African corruption empirically and geographically, and links its levels of severity using correlations to gross domestic product per capita, literacy, income inequality and freedom of the media.

The major findings are that while the vast majority of the continent’s one billion people live under very corrupt regimes, the impacts of corruption on economic growth are questionable. Few geographic studies of corruption exist.

The paper’s novelty stems in part from being the first to explore African corruption from a spatial perspective, illustrating its widely varying contexts and consequences.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the strategies of civil service reforms in Hong Kong and Thailand. It seeks to identify the drivers of reforms in the two cases and explain the divergence in processes that were intended to achieve similar ends.

This paper adopts a case study approach along with a thorough review of the literature. It is based on secondary materials, including academic studies, government publications and websites, and media reports. It compares approaches, strategies and outcomes of civil service reforms in Hong Kong and Thailand.

Civil service reforms in Hong Kong focused on improving management through the implementation of New Public Management (NPM) principles, while governance values were prominent in civil service reforms in Thailand.

This paper compares civil service reforms in two dissimilar Asian cases. It highlights the impact of global trends on traditional bureaucratic organizations and reform strategies, and recognizes the impacts of traditions, culture and capacity on civil service reforms.