Gordon Brown last year did an NHS with development aid: he pumped in billions extra without any real, deep thinking about reforming how it should be spent. While the government’s early work on development aid went in the right direction, creating a Cabinet-level government department and untying aid from the purchase of British products, today DFID looks increasingly aimless. The 1997 choice of Clare Short was a masterstroke; unfortunately, the Department has lacked that strength of leadership ever since her departure in 2003.

But Mr Brown is spot on in his call today for more to be done to tackle corruption:

We must all open our books, be open to scrutiny, be open and above board and above suspicion. There must be no truck with the old secrecy, no support for the old obscuring of financial truths, no tolerance of the old corruption. Corruption affects the poorest and most vulnerable people in poor countries.

As Transparency International puts it:

According to research conducted by the World Bank, widespread corruption can cause the growth rate of a country to be 0.5 to 1.0 percentage points lower than that of a similar country with little corruption. Widespread corruption can also radically reduce inward investment. A study based on the TI Corruption Perceptions Index shows that a rise in corruption levels from that of Singapore (very low) to that of Mexico's (very high) is equivalent to raising the marginal tax rate by over twenty percent. As a single percentage point increase in the marginal tax rate is calculated as reducing inward foreign investment by about five percent, in the instance given corruption has cost the country and continues to cost the country virtually all of the foreign direct investment it might otherwise have expected to receive.