Civil service reform and anti-corruption: Does ethics training reduce corruption in the civil service?
To learn more about this project, contact Principal Investigator Jan-Hinrik Meyer-Sahling.

Project Summary
What is the impact of ethics training on corruption in the civil service? This project builds on the insights of the ‘Civil Service Reform and Anti-Corruption Project’ (funded under Phase 1 of the ACE programme), which sought to identify which civil service management practices are effective in reducing corruption in the civil service. To shed light on this question, the project conducted civil service surveys in ten countries in four developing regions. With 23.000 participants, it produced the largest cross-country survey of bureaucrats in developing countries ever conducted. Among other findings, the survey showed 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 trainings for civil servants. The current project will provide evidence of the effects of such trainings, surveying corruption and (un)ethical behaviour of 1,200 civil servants in Nepal and Bangladesh over time while providing state-of-the-art ethics training. The effectiveness of the training will be examined in a field experiment to provide rigorous evidence on how to design ethics trainings that work.
Policy and Programming Implications
The research will provide insights for those who seek innovative tools to reduce corruption in the public sector and promote ethical behaviour among civil servants. The findings will directly inform the efforts of government partners in Nepal and Bangladesh to develop and continuously implement ethics trainings that promote ethical behaviour of civil servants. The insights will help civil society and international organisations to monitor and evaluate the implementation of anti-corruption policy in the two countries, as well develop anti-corruption strategies more broadly.
Research Questions
- What is the impact of ethics training on corruption in the civil service?
- What types of effects do ethics trainings have on the attitudes of civil servants toward corruption, the (un)ethical behaviour of civil servants, and the wider capacity of organisations to provide public goods?
- To what extent do the effects of ethics trainings last over time?
- Can ethics trainings promote ethical leadership practices that have wider effects on reducing corruption in the civil service?
Methodology
The project principally relies on a randomised field experiment and a panel study of participants to examine whether the state-of-the-art ethics trainings can reduce corruption in the civil service. The field experiment can provide guidance on whether ethics training has positive causal—rather than merely correlational—effects, and thus provide robust evidence on whether ethics training does, in fact, work to reduce corruption. For the field experiment, a randomly assigned treatment group of civil servants will be trained in the first period; a ‘wait-listed’ control group of civil servants will be trained in the second period.
The field experiment and panel survey will be complemented by semi-structured interviews to inform the design of the ethics training courses, particularly to adapt the training to the local context. Interviews will further be conducted after completion of the training to generate supplementary qualitative evidence for its effectiveness.
ACE Impact
Findings
First, a survey of civil servants in ten countries across four developing regions, with more than 23,000 participants, revealed that public servants in the Global South often lack awareness of ethical problems in their work context, knowledge of relevant ethics and integrity rules and regulations, and have limited experience with training in public service ethics.
Second, the initial finding was taken up by governments in Nepal and Bangladesh, leading to the design and implementation of ethics training programmes that focus on the development of ethical leadership skills and practices. In Nepal, the ethical leadership training was implemented in collaboration with the tax administration. It involved the training of tax officials in 40 inland revenue offices across the country. In Bangladesh, the ethical leadership and policy integrity training was developed in collaboration with Bangladesh Police and implemented with police officers in one police district.
Third, the experience with ethical leadership training has been positive in both contexts. Initial findings indicated an improvement of ethical competences among public servants, the application of ethical leadership practices, and greater confidence both in applying ethics and integrity regulations and in confronting ethically challenging situations in the work context. The evaluation of the training also identified a decrease in unethical behaviour by officers trained in the Bangladesh project.
The findings are relevant well beyond the cases of Nepal and Bangladesh. They suggest that ethics training is a potentially effective tool to curb corruption in public service directly, and as an instrument to complement the wider menu of anti-corruption policies.
Impact
- The development of the survey instrument to measure issues related to corruption, ethics, integrity and, more broadly, human resources management in public administration, has been scaled up and implemented in more than 20 countries since the completion of the first project. The survey results have been compiled in reports for international organisations, governments, and institutions within multiple countries. They have influenced civil service reforms in countries such as Chile, Kosovo, Croatia, and Nepal.
- The survey research has led to the foundation of the Global Survey of Public Servants (GSPS) as a joint initiative of the World Bank, Stanford University, UCL, and Nottingham University. The GSPS showcases survey data from more than 30 countries, as well as the conceptual underpinnings of surveys in government and methodological guidance for users in government and academia.
- The global survey initiatives have been taken up by other international organisations such as the Inter-American Development Bank to assess integrity and competences in statistics offices in 14 Latin American countries, the European Commission to support a pan-European survey of public servants and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development/Support for Improvement in Governance and Management (OECD/SIGMA) unit to measure public administration reform progress in EU accession countries.
- The ethics training programmes in Nepal and Bangladesh have had important local impacts. In Nepal, the NGO Pro Public has founded a Centre for Public Service Ethics that seeks to support ethics and integrity initiatives in public administration. In Bangladesh, the police force has supported efforts to expand the ethics training to additional police districts.
Publications

Oiling the Bureaucracy? Political Spending, Bureaucrats and the Resource Curse
What role do bureaucrats play in the development of the resource curse in countries that have recently discovered oil? Much of the resource curse literature argues that political leaders spend natural resource revenue in ways that entrench their political power…

Do Bureaucrats Contribute to the Resource Curse? Evidence from a Survey Experiment in New Oil States
The resource curse literature argues that oil production reshapes the fiscal contract between citizens and the state: politicians become less responsive to citizen taxpayers and more likely to use public revenues for their own benefit. This paper examines whether and…

A Cross-Cultural Basis for Public Service? Public Service Motivation Measurement Invariance in an Original Survey of 23,000 Public Servants in Ten Countries and Four World Regions
Public service motivation (PSM) is a core concept in public administration, studied in surveys across numerous countries. Whether these studies accumulate comparable knowledge about PSM crucially depends on PSM measurement invariance: that PSM has a similar measurement structure in different national contexts. Yet,…

Bureaucratic Professionalization is a Contagious Process Inside Government: Evidence from a Priming Experiment with 3,000 Chilean Civil Servants
Education is central to theories of how bureaucracies professionalize. Going back to Weber, the process towards a capable and professional bureaucracy has been viewed as driven by the entry of well-educated, professional recruits. We argue that this perspective misses important…

Exit, Voice, and Sabotage: Public Service Motivation and Guerrilla Bureaucracy in Times of Unprincipled Political Principals
Democratic backsliding has multiplied “unprincipled” political principals: governments with weak commitment to the public interest. Why do some bureaucrats engage in voice and guerrilla sabotage to thwart policies against the public interest under “unprincipled principals,” yet others do not? Despite…

Responding to COVID‐19 through Surveys of Public Servants
Responding to COVID‐19 presents unprecedented challenges for public sector practitioners. Addressing those challenges requires knowledge about the problems that public sector workers face. This essay argues that timely, up‐to‐date surveys of public sector workers are essential tools for identifying problems,…

Merit recruitment, tenure protections and public service motivation: Evidence from a conjoint experiment with 7,300 public servants in Latin America, Africa and Eastern Europe
How can governments manage civil servants to enhance public service motivation (PSM)? Despite the centrality of PSM in public administration research, the effects of management practices on PSM remain understudied. We address this gap through a conjoint experiment with 7,300…
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Research Team Members

Jan-Hinrik Meyer-Sahling
University of Nottingham

Christian Schuster
University College London

Kim Sass Mikkelsen
Roskilde University

Shree Krishna Shrestha
Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu

Taiabur Rahman
University of Dhaka

Kazi Maruful Islam
University of Dhaka