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A contemporary analysis of corruption in the Asia-Pacific region. Bringing academics and practitioners together, contributors to this book discuss the current perspectives of corruption's challenges in both theory and practice, and what the future challenges will be in addressing corruption's proliferation in the region.

Through a policy and legal analysis, this book shows how corruption facilitates money laundering, and vice versa. Furthermore, it demonstrates specifically how the responses developed to combat one type of financial crime can productively be employed in fighting the other. Summary reprinted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan

Corruption is the biggest single obstacle to development, while money laundering is at the heart of all profit-driven crime. The failure to appreciate the intimate linkages between these two crimes has undermined international efforts to combat these global scourges. Through a policy and legal analysis, this book shows how corruption facilitates money laundering and vice versa. It demonstrates how strategies utilized to counter one type of financial crime can be adapted to fight the other.  Chaikin and Sharman provide a pioneering evaluation of the current systems from multi-disciplinary perspective based on professional experience and extensive interviews.

East Asia and the Pacific is a region of dynamic growth. Women have contributed significantly to this growth and have benefited from it through active participation in the labor market. However, women are still disproportionately represented in the informal sector and in low paid work. Efforts to identify barriers to women's business and entrepreneurial activities in the region are critical not only to facilitate inclusive growth in a national context but also to counter the increasing trend of female migratory flows in the region. This report highlights' both the challenges and the economic opportunities for businesswomen in the region offers some useful potential pointers for reform.

Politicians in the Pacific Islands are regularly accused of corruption and yet, paradoxically, they also tend to be the most vocal public commentators when incidents of misconduct arise, with accusation and counter-accusation all part of the political theatre. Given their central role in these debates, we ask how politicians interpret political conduct. Based on interviews and public comments, we explore the meanings and beliefs that politicians in Samoa ascribe to three interrelated cases where the actions of their colleagues are under scrutiny. We find a series of divergent and conflicting views. We add to the literature on corruption, both in the Pacific and more generally, by showing how questions about conduct not only vary according to context but are invariably rooted in the cut and thrust of everyday politics, which in this case is dominated by the question of leadership succession.

During 2012, Malaysia’s Prime Minister Najib Razak undertook a number of political and economic reforms. At the same time, his rival, former Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, was found not guilty of sexual misconduct charges. However, major corruption scandals continued to break. And a large scale protest over electoral cheating turned violent. Meanwhile, the economy remained on an even keel, while the government negotiated with the U.S. over entry into the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

In this study, we examine the regional impacts of the 1997 Asian Crisis on Governance. We use World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators (i.e. WGI) which includes six dimensions of governance. These six dimensions are “Voice and Accountability”, “Political Stability and Absence of Violence”, “Government Effectiveness”, “Regulatory Quality”, “Rule of Law”, and “Control of Corruption”. The seven regions that we examine are North America, Europe and Central Asia, Latin America and Caribbean, East Asia and Pacific, South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Middle East and North Africa. Our findings show that, due to the crisis, while the overall rankings of Latin America and Caribbean, and Sub-Saharan Africa improved, the overall rankings of Europe and Central Asia, East Asia and Pacific, South Asia, and Middle East and North Africa declined. There was no change in the ranking of North America due to the crisis. Both pre- and post-crisis, North America has the highest ranking in all six measures of governance.

In Solomon Islands, constituency development funds (CDFs) are public money. These funds are allocated to and distributed by members of parliament (MPs) in order to facilitate economic development across constituencies. They were ostensibly introduced in order to over-come the problem that when public funds are channelled through line ministries, they do not reach, nor facilitate economic development at, the local-village level. However, CDFs have been open to exactly the sort of exploitation and manipulation that the bureaucratic structures of the state are designed to prevent. There has been considerable criticism of the regulation of CDFs, but to date the critique has largely focused on state actors and state regulation. This has led to a problematically circular argument – state regulation, dependent upon state bureaucratic capacity, is required to fix problems caused by lack of state bureaucratic capacity. Drawing upon understandings of nodal governance, this thesis enquires whether all the regulation of CDFs occurs at the state level, or whether there is regulation that also occurs below the level of the state. It develops two detailed empirical case studies that show the multiple scales of regulation of CDFs in two constituencies in Solomon Islands: Gizo/Kolombangara in Western Province and Baegu/Asifola in Malaita Province. The thesis shows that there are many different types of regulatory actors involved, and that the overall regulatory system is influenced by the relationships that exist between them. Through a comparison between the two constituencies, it also shows the enormous variety in regulatory structures that exist at very local levels in Solomon Islands. This both complicates a vision of regulation that is based on the state, but also provides potential opportunities for interventions to strengthen accountability and transparency through going beyond the state. Among other findings, this thesis illustrates the need to look below and above the state in understanding how regulation does and can occur. It suggests that more collaboration between state actors, non-state actors and international actors in the regulation and governance of CDFs in Solomon Islands may strengthen the regulatory system around CDFs.

Pacific Islands offshore financial centers (OFCS) are battling against the danger that international organizations will cut them off from the global financial system. Since 1999 the image of the region's tax havens has been most shaped by the \"horror story\" of Nauru—the media's account of how Nauru has been involved with the Bank of New York and other banks in tens of billions of dollars of Russian money laundering, tax evasion, and illegal capital flight. In the late 1990s left-of-center governments led international organizations toward a much more aggressive attack on offshore financial centers. Soon international organizations began blacklisting offshore centers and threatening sanctions—with Pacific Islands being prominent targets. The advent of the conservative Bush administration in America defused a number of threats to offshore centers from international organizations, as the United States began to object to Europe's anti-tax haven agenda. While the attacks of 11 September 2001 led international organizations to rebuke offshore centers for helping to finance terrorism, OFC promoters contended that the anti-OFC campaign had been so weakened and qualified since the Bush presidency that it might soon collapse. The future of Pacific Islands offshore centers may rest on the outcome of political struggles in the United States, Europe, and international organizations. Two things are clear: that the dominant media image of a number of Pacific Islands states may continue to be shaped by perceptions of their offshore financial centers (making them targets of moral indignation), and that their international relations may at times be held hostage to the issue of their tax havens.