Volcker Commission Report

The independent Volcker Commission has just issued its report on the anticorruption investigative unit of the World Bank, also known by its acronym, INT.  The focus of Commission's work was to assess in depth the INT unit of the Bank.  Yet the Commission also reviewed the World Bank's anticorruption effort more broadly, and in its report it called for resolute and concrete progress on implementing an ambitious anti-corruption program. Further, the Volcker Commission report, in its opening pages, notes in particular the role of the World Bank Institute (WBI) in the work that has taken place on anti-corruption with countries. In a number of places the report utilizes WBI's research and analysis, and mentions many bibliographical references from WBI's work.  One excerpt on the role of WBI: 

'The World Bank Institute has long pioneered in analyzing the pervasiveness of corruption, its causes, and its adverse effects on economic development. The economic losses to corruption are enormous overall, and, further, aid effectiveness is much lower in corrupt environments. The Bank's projects are much less likely to succeed where there is poor governance and high corruption... The rigorous independent efforts of the World Bank Institute in measuring, monitoring, and assessing governance and anticorruption around the world, and particularly in countries wishing assistance, plainly needs further support and could also assist INT and others in an empirically-based risk assessment of countries and projects'.⁴        

'Citizens of developing countries are themselves highly sensitive to the need to
attack corruption and improve governance. For instance, in a recent set of surveys, a
quarter of the respondents in emerging economies cited anticorruption and governance as
the “main role” for the Bank and comparable institutions... From another
point of view, business firms consistently rank corruption as an obstacle—often the most
important obstacle—in doing business in emerging economies' ⁵ (from paragraphs 8 and 9 of the full Volcker Commission report).

Links to research citations from the report (particularly from endnotes 4 and 5): http://ssrn.com/abstract=829244; http://ssrn.com/abstract=386904; http://www.govindicators.org

For access to the full Volcker Independent Panel Review:  http://siteresources.worldbank.org/NEWS/Resources/Volcker_
Report_Sept._12,_for_website_FINAL.pdf

World Bank's President Zoellick welcomed the finding and recommendations of the Report.  For details, see http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/NEWS/0,,contentMDK:21469454~page
PK:64257043~piPK:437376~theSitePK:4607,00.html