Corruption in Serbia

This report contains an account of our research on corruption in Serbia. The project was funded by the Dutch Embassy in Serbia and constituted our second attempt to shed light on the nature of corruption in Serbia and the ways it is handled by the law enforcement agencies. Doing research is penetrating and scouting new territory, though the reader may wonder what is new in the field of corruption. Was there not always corruption and do we not regularly learn about corruption scandals in the media? That is true, but how systematic is that knowledge? What are the facts and figures of the authorities and, in particular, how reliable are these? When we started our reconnaissance these questions were hardly addressed systematically. In short: nobody knew much two years ago at the time of our first research project, or knew when we started anew. This lack of knowledge growth is itself already a research finding. This means that while there is new legislation, a national strategy and an Anti Corruption Agency, the basic systematic knowledge on which all these efforts should be built remained absent.