https://navalny.com/p/4573/
I think Alexei Navalny and his team should get a Nobel Prize in whatever, maybe in Literature, for a series of investigative reports about government corruption in Russia. Even in China and Malaysia, where corruption is rampant, government officials and their immediate families don't have direct business relationships with crime syndicates like they do in Russia. Most officials in Asia may have to deal with the organized crime from time to time, but they don't form joint ventures with the mafia. Furthermore, they don't have the crime boss mentality that Putin and his cronies demonstrate on the world scene day after day after day.
Political issues aside, I wonder whether new digital money technologies, e.g. BitCoin, are going to affect government corruption mechanisms. On the one hand, bitcoin bribes are supposed to be untraceable. On the other hand, bitcoin is essentially a digital asset tracking system that can give us a history of every penny spent on the globe. Maybe we should have a special kind of digital currency for use by public agencies only. Would this increase the transparency of transactions? I haven't seen any papers on the subject yet.