December is always busy for those working on anticorruption, with the international day of recognition coming on December 9 each year. This year was particularly so as the largest gathering of anticorruption activists, practitioners, and observers, the International Anti-Corruption Conference (IACC) took place in Washington DC in the first week of December. Here are links to a few posts that were inspired by or related to the event.

Arturo Herrera and I posted about the World Bank’s efforts to help countries control corruption, noting that controlling corruption is not optional.

Mouhamadou Diagne also posted on the World Bank’s activities, focusing mostly on our efforts to manage corruption risks in our own projects.

In an effort to start a conversation on the real costs of corruption, some colleagues produced a video including short reflections by Arturo Herrera, Delia Ferreira Rubio, Patrick Alley, and John Githongo. Watch the video and read the blog by Till Hartmann and Carlos Ferreyra: What are the costs of corruption? (And please leave your thoughts as comments to Till’s and Carlos’s post.)

And once the serious work was done, I was able to have some fun with new AI-based chatbot, Chat GPT.  It did remarkably well at answering corruption-related questions in the sense that the responses tended toward the consensus, or at least majority, views. The conversation also went in some unusual directions about its heroes, its mother, and whether or not “anticorruption” should have a hyphen.

Finally, kudos to the organizers of the IACC, and participants as well. It was a huge effort and a huge success.