Think of Collective, If You Want to Defeat Corruption

The adoption of numerous legal initiatives to fight corruption by the main international organizations (World Bank, EU, and OECD, for instance) is based on a solid economic understanding of the phenomenon. Economic analysis, starting with the seminal studies of Kruger and Bhagwati in 1974, has today expanded widely: periodically, the various cost items caused by corruption are estimated with respect to all countries and government contexts (for example, inefficiencies in real and financial markets, reduction of fiscal receipts, dearth of public goods, decrease in macroeconomic performance, erosion of trust in institutions, increase in social inequality, reduction in foreign investment). Thus "a veritable avalanche of paper" (to quote a dissertation I recently supervised) has been produce on the issue, regarding the causes, the effects, and especially the channels through which reiterated practices of corruption and bribery manage to undermine the foundations of modern socio-economic systems.
According to the World Bank, countries that keep corruption under control can increase per capita income by 300%, and coming to Italy, corruption cost the country €60 billion in 2010, according to the assessment made by the Court of Public Accounts, a staggering 30% growth with respect to a year earlier.
Since we know how much it cost us and what the damages are, we consequently know how much it is worth to fight corruption. For more than a decade international agreements have been signed by major countries, including Italy, which mandate the adoption of effective anti-corruption legal instruments and identify the main areas of intervention.
In spite of this, international criticism toward our country has not abated. According to the NGO Transparency International, Italy slid from the 29th place in 2001 to the 67th place in 2010 in the world in terms of how little corruption is perceived to be a problem, behind Ghana, Samoa and Rwanda, and at the same level of Georgia, Panama, and Trinidad and Tobago. And intergovernmental organizations do not portray a better picture. The latest reports by OECD and the Council of Europe regarding the implementation of international agreements by Italy highlight serious critical elements of systemic inadequacy, and the forthcoming publication of the third GRECO (Group of States against Corruption) report by the Council of Europe at the end of 2011 is set to underscore further gaps in the fight against corruption.
Leaving moral exhortations aside, which are commendable but basically ineffective, what reasons are behind the gap found between the costs of corruption and the international commitments to counter them, on one side, and the worsening of the problem denounced by the international community, on the other? I think it lies in the difficulty of identifying and implementing political mechanisms that put the individual interest of the public agent in line with collective interest and the social optimum. This conundrum is found not only in the fight against corruption, but in any national and international policy aimed at limiting the consequences of the assumption, following the classical economic model, of the individual agent and personal interest as points of reference for human action. International agencies have already done their share of the work and can only continue on the path they have set for governments. It now falls to states, which are collective agents par excellence to act decisively against graft and bribery.