Global Integrity Anti-corruption Evidence Programme
Funder: Global Integrity/Department for International Development (DfID)
Principal investigator: Professor Jan-Hinrik Meyer-Sahling
Duration: January 2019 - June 2021
Jan Meyer-Sahling has recently been awarded funding from the Global Integrity Anti-Corruption Evidence Programme for a project on 'Civil service reform and anti-corruption: Does ethics training reduce corruption in the civil service?’.
The project is co-led with Christian Schuster (UCL) and Kim Sass Mikkelsen (Roskilde University), and builds on an earlier project funded by DfID and the British Academy on what works in civil service management, in particular, which management practice are effective in reducing bureaucratic corruption. This project found that one common management practice – ethics training – does not correlate with lower corruption or more ethical behaviour of civil servants. In response, several governments asked for guidance on how to design effective ethics training, and evidence on its effects.
The new project will provide such evidence. It will survey corruption and (un)ethical behaviour of 1,200 civil servants in Nepal and Bangladesh over time, while providing them with a semester-long state-of-the-art ethics training in a field experiment (RCT).