Dani Kaufmann, anti-corruption expert and blogger

After more than two decades of service, Dani Kaufmann will be leaving the World Bank. If you didn't catch his farewell lecture last week, you can still see a video of it here. I highly recommend it - if ever you wondered whether someone could make a difference inside a large institution, this is it.

I'll leave Kaufmann's long list of achievements to others who know better than I. Instead, I'll just point out two things that grabbed my attention during his lecture. The first is that Kaufmann was introduced as being, among other things, "a pioneer in blogging" at the World Bank. If you haven't had a chance to read Governance Matters you've been missing out. (Also check out his personal blog, The Kaufmann Governance Post.)

The second item that caught my attention is perhaps one of the most interesting Powerpoint slides I've ever seen (around 51 minutes into the lecture):

   

Notice anything interesting? Shouldn't it be one of those 'developing' countries that has a problem with corruption? Not according to this data, which comes from 2004. (See page 34 of Kaufmann's presentation for the original.) Now I wonder what that might tell us about the origins of the financial crisis...