Corruption takes place when public officials break the law in pursuit of their private interest. But public officials can break different laws in different ways with different implications for the public good. The factors driving corruption and the effects of corruption can therefore vary widely. Understanding the causes and consequences of corruption is particularly important in developing countries, which almost without exception suffer from high levels of corruption. The virtual uniformity of this evidence strongly suggests that developing countries must share some powerful common drivers of corruption that are different from those that affect advanced industrial countries. At the same time, the very diverse economic performance of developing countries suggests that not all developing countries suffer from the same types of corruption. These two observations, summarized in our first section, provide the backdrop to my analytical investigation. I begin this investigation by identifying the drivers of corruption implicit in most conventional neoclassical economic analysis of the topic. Although these drivers are undoubtedly important in many contexts, I next argue that a number of other drivers of corruption may be mor
