Introduction • 15 address all types of corruption simultaneously, good policy should focus on the types of corruption most damaging to development, such as corruption that wastes precious investment resources. Reform priorities should respond to actual challenges and circumstances. Otherwise, anti-corruption and other governance reform efforts can set unattainable targets, inadvertently causing eventual disillusionment and reform fatigue as failure becomes apparent.
Reform implications and priorities The preceding discussion shows that current understandings and measures of governance, especially in relation to economic development, are not only imperfect but also problematic. However, these flawed governance quality indicators and policy presumptions are being imposed by international financial institutions and donor country policymakers to reshape national institutions, policies and programmes as conditions for receiving development aid. But until more is known about improving governance and its likely impacts on economic progress, such requirements and conditionalities may do more harm than good. Policymakers have been relying on conventional wisdom or prejudice in claiming a strong relationship between institutional reforms and development outcomes as there is no robust empirical support for this view. Furthermore, no strong evidence exists for guiding and determining how to prioritize and sequence governance reforms. The World Bank’s World Development Report 1997 advised developing countries to pay attention to 45 aspects of good governance; by 2002, barely five years later, the list had grown to 116 items. Even allowing for considerable overlap among these items, it seems that countries needing to improve their governance must undertake a great deal more to do so, and the longer they wait, the more they will need to do. Unfortunately, the long and lengthening agenda often means that a multitude of governance reforms need to be undertaken urgently, often with little thought to their sequencing, interdependence or relative contributions to the overall goal of reforming governments to be more efficient, effective and responsive, let alone more able and likely to alleviate poverty. Among the multitude of governance reforms deemed necessary for economic growth, development or poverty reduction, there is typically little guidance about what is considered essential and what is not, what should come first and what should follow, what can be achieved in the short term and what can only be achieved over the longer term, what is feasible and what is not (Grindle 2004).
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