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The purpose of this paper is to analyze recent Japanese corruption prevention mechanisms and assess the efforts of the Japanese government in winning public trust.

This paper discusses public sector corruption in Japan at an institutional level through a study of its features and current status. It then analyzes and evaluates the effectiveness of corruption prevention measures and the public perceptions of these measures. The paper concludes with a discussion on whether such measures can be adopted by other countries.

Recent preventive measures in Japan are effective in decreasing corruption opportunities, but not in enhancing the public trust of the government. Major findings are: first, Japan is the only Asian country without a dedicated anti-corruption agency (ACA); second, there is more emphasis on corruption prevention in the anti-corruption measures; third, the government is concerned with initiating measures to prevent the further erosion of public trust when corruption occurs; fourth, while preventive measures such as public disclosure and whistle-blower protection acts are in place, public awareness of their existence is still lacking and the usage of these systems is limited; fifth, more efforts are placed on prevention through the promotion of government transparency and accountability and public sector ethics education rather than penalizing the corrupt offenders; and sixth, though efforts to minimize amakudari practices are made, lack of political will and its sustainability prevents further reform.

This paper will be useful for scholars, policy-makers, and anti-corruption practitioners interested in learning how Japanese government practices prevent corruption.

The purpose of this paper is to illuminate the hidden process of collusion among power holders in state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in an emerging economy, which endures despite comprehensive reforms towards democracy and good governance. Why are mechanisms of checks and balances not functioning in the way they should?

The analysis is based on in-depth interviews with board members, executives, politicians, bureaucrats and representatives from auditing boards involved in the management of SOEs in Indonesia.

The findings reveal practices of collective conservatism, reciprocal opportunism and normalisation of corruption. The costs of getting into powerful positions are so high that conglomerate business owners gain control over the management of SOEs. The authors use the terms “wall-building and gatekeeping” to explain such cases.

There is a continuous process of wall building and gatekeeping occurring among business oligarchs, bureaucrats and elected politicians in Indonesia. New entrants into the system are co-opted by the established elite.

This study shows collusion, rent-seeking and corruption among political and business elites as well as top officials in the government hinder good governance reforms in state-owned Indonesian enterprises.

Collusion and illicit business practices in SOEs are clearly grounded on wall building and gatekeeping. Tackling this problem is a precondition for good governance and an improved legal and regulatory business environment in Indonesia. The ideal separation of powers and the checks and balances for good governance apparently need more than a democracy to break through. A further strengthening of the free press and critical academics will be one crucial contribution.

There is generally a lack of understanding of the context of corruption, such as the influence of institutional and organisational structures. The topic of corruption is also under-researched due to the difficulty of finding empire evidence. This paper contributes to explaining why new political and organisational structures, such as a democratically elected parliament and a particularly designed corruption eradication commission, are not able to hinder rent-seeking practices and illicit political business in state agencies.

With the surge in public procurement, especially in developing countries, ensuring fair competition in procurement has assumed paramount importance. Academic endeavors in the domain of competition issues have often lacked the views of field-level functionaries. This study aims to involve a large number of expert practitioners in India to identify the significant contemporary competition risks in public procurement from the procurer and supplier sides and develop a model depicting the hierarchy of competition-restrictive actions (CRAs) in procurement based on their mutual interactions.

The significant CRAs along the procurement cycle are identified through literature survey, interactive workshops and expert interviews. A questionnaire survey covering 143 respondents from 12 public organizations is used to evaluate their impact. Considering the complex causal interactions involved, interpretive structural modeling followed by MICMAC (Iimpact matrix cross-reference multiplication applied to a classification analysis is used to develop a hierarchical model of competition risks in procurement.

Tailor-made contracts, splitting of a project below competition thresholds, restrictive selection criteria and awarding the contract on nomination emerge as CRAs with the highest driving power. Horizontal collusion among vendors strongly depends on practices followed in the procuring organization.

The survey data and the experts’ opinions emanate from practitioners in India, which is a limitation. However, with necessary contextual calibrations, the study is of high functional utility to policymakers and practitioners.

The research facilitates a comprehensive understanding to procurement managers/policymakers of the CRAs along the procurement cycle and their interdependencies. It offers valuable insights for improving competition, which is foundational for optimal procurement outcomes.

The study enriches the public procurement domain knowledge by identifying and assessing the significant contemporary CRAs, examining their mutual interactions and developing an interpretive structural model. Although contributing to the body of knowledge, the study is unique in being grounded in field realities.

Using a general model of corruption that explains and accounts for corruption across professions and institutions, this chapter will examine how certain practices in the media, especially in areas where journalism, advertising and public relations regularly intersect and converge, can be construed as instances of corruption. It will be argued that such corruption, as in the case of cash-for-comment scandals, advertorials, infomercials, and infotainment, as well as public relations media releases disseminated misleadingly as journalistic opinion, is regular, ubiquitous, and systematic.

The main aim of this paper is to review some of the newest and most promising advances in auction theory with an eye to applications to procurement practice. Here we focus in particular on four topics related to multidimensional auctions: 1) how to define a proper scoring rule when the awarding bodies lack the necessary information regarding its own preferences and suppliers’ technology; 2) how to cope with the information disclosure policy regarding the discretional evaluation of some aspects of each contractual proposal; 3) how to use contractors’ reputations based on their past performance in the awarding process; 4) how to control the risk of collusion and corruption in the awarding phase.

The purpose of this paper is to use open-source Russian government data to investigate the relationship between transparency and corruption. Russia is a developed country with a strong legal system and world-class transparency in government contracting, which according to many, should positively impact corruption. This study tests that hypothesis.

The paper statistically analyzes six months’ worth of Russian government contracts from a single Russian province and another month of data from a different province for comparison. The statistical analysis revealed individual instances of corruption, which were then analyzed qualitatively.

The paper found that competitiveness in Russian government contracting is extremely limited, and instances of corruption on a grand scale are easy to find in publicly available data.

The paper only studied data from two Russian provinces, so readers should be careful about generalizing from the results. Further research should consider similar data, if obtainable, from other countries.

Countries seeking to limit corruption should consider cultural change, as well as modifications to government processes and legal systems.

The paper indicates that sound and transparent legal structures, by themselves, may be insufficient to prevent or discourage corruption.

This paper aims to investigate the prevalence of corruption in Ghana to understand how and why it has turned public procurement into a mere money-making scheme instead of a means to provide needed public goods and services.

The study focuses on Ghana as a case study and mobilizes the monetization of politics lenses. Data are collected via interviews with key officials across the procurement sector (including the government, donors and civil society), documents, documentaries and news articles.

The findings suggest that the increasing costs of elections and political financing coupled with the costs of vote-buying, which has become informally institutionalized, intensify corruption practices and, consequently, turns public procurement into a mere source of cash for political ends. Political appointments and legalized loopholes facilitate this by helping to nullify the safeguard accounting and other control institutions are designed to provide. Likewise, enduring poverty and rising inequality “force” citizens into a vote-buying culture which distorts democratic premises that may drive out unscrupulous politicians; thus, perpetuating capture schemes. Civil society's efforts to remedy these have had little success, and corruption and inequality remain rife.

The main practical implication of the study lies in the need for a gradual demonetization of elections, and the consideration of the fundamental function of public procurement as a policy instrument embedded in economic, social, cultural and environmental plans. Additionally, given the connectedness of the various corruption issues raised, a comprehensive system-based approach in dealing with them would be more effective than a piecemeal approach targeting each issue/problem in isolation.

While extant literature has examined the issue of endemic corruption in developing countries using state capture, few have attempted to explain why it remains enduring, particularly in public procurement. This study, therefore, contributes to the literature on corruption and state capture theoretically and empirically by drawing on monetization of politics from political science to explain why corruption and state capture endure in certain contexts (with Ghana as an illustrative example) which reduce public procurement to a cash-milking scheme.

This study aims to investigate the content and determinants of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) anti-corruption disclosures (ACDs) of public-listed Indonesian companies using institutional and legitimacy theories.

A content analysis method is used to extract the anti-corruption information in the annual reports. This study uses 40 checklist items developed and used by prior studies to measure the extent of CSR ACD. Univariate and multivariate analyses are applied to examine the determinants of ACD.

The results show that the disclosure level of anti-corruption is considerably satisfactory at 44.9%. The whistle-blowing theme is the most frequently reported. Size of firm and industry type have significant effects on ACD. Surprisingly, the findings show that government ownership has a negative effect on ACD.

The study is limited to one year of observation and is therefore unable to capture changes in the level of disclosure due to policy changes. The results of this study help anti-corruption decision-makers by taking into account the company’s legitimacy and isomorphic factors when formulating ACD policies and efforts that could be made to promote greater disclosure of anti-corruption information.

This study contributes to the discourse of CSR by providing a more comprehensive extent and more determinants of ACD practice in an emerging country from the lens of legitimacy and institutional theories.