Ukraine’s 2010 programme with the IMF did not mention corruption at all. The 2026 IMF programme had an entire section on corruption. Does this mean that under Yanukovych, corruption in Ukraine was much lower than today? Not at all. On the contrary, as Becker et al. (2023) showed, Ukraine made considerable progress in reducing corruption and building anti-corruption infrastructure. However, this issue remains central in policy discussions about Ukraine, including the debate about military and financial support during the full-scale war and beyond. 

Attention to the issue may partly stem from public opinion: Ukrainians name corruption the second-most important issue for their country after the war. In our survey, discussed below, corruption perceptions are extremely high (Figure 1).

Figure 1 Opinions of Ukrainians on the extent of corruption and its importance for the country

However, such surveys reflect perceptions of corruption, which are only weakly correlated with actual corruption (Sarullo et al. 2026, Deryugina et al. 2025). Moreover, active prosecution of corrupt officials may result in the integrity paradox (Nieuwenburg 2007): information on higher numbers of prosecuted officials increases rather than decreases the perceived level of corruption in a country. 

If perceptions are only weakly correlated with actual levels of corruption, why do we pay so much attention to them? We study perceptions because they affect many important real-life variables: higher corruption perceptions reduce FDI and economic growth (Mauro 1995), decrease trust in government (Pittaluga et al. 2024), increase borrowing costs and stock market volatility (Hlatshwayo et al. 2018). Moreover, higher perceived corruption can become a self-fulfilling prophecy (Corbacho et al. 2016, Čábelková and Hanousek 2004).

In Gorodnichenko et al. (2026), we find that people with higher corruption perceptions are more willing to emigrate and less likely to donate in response to a request by an official, while the willingness to donate when asked by a friend, a volunteer, or an army member is not affected (Figure 2).

Figure 2 Willingness to donate or volunteer in response to requests from various sources

Moreover, since Ukraine’s reconstruction FDI needs are at least $40 billion a year (Gorodnichenko and Obstfeld 2026), the creation of corruption-resilient infrastructure for reconstruction (Wedel 2023) and current support are an important theme of Ukraine-related debate (Nell et al. 2023). 

Since 2014, Ukraine has made significant progress in fighting corruption. It has established a number of public agencies tasked with uncovering, punishing, and preventing high-level corruption. Recently, a former head of the President’s Office was put in jail based on an investigation by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau. By the end of 2025, the Higher Anti-Corruption Court, which started operations in late 2019, had convicted 133 high-level officials and judges. Despite this progress, the public perceives the government’s willingness to fight corruption as rather low (Figure 3).

Figure 3 Perception of government efforts in fighting corruption (% of respondents) 

At the same time, more publications on potential or proven corruption cases can increase people’s perceptions of corruption or prevent them from decreasing.

This leads us to the question of how information affects people’s perceptions of corruption and the government’s willingness to fight corruption. To answer this question, we ran a randomised controlled trial to see how information on convictions and/or incidence of corruption affects people’s beliefs. 

The first wave of the survey included more than 7,000 respondents. We asked people to rate on a 1-10 scale how corrupt the government is in general and its specific agencies (Figure 4), and how willing the government is to fight corruption. We also asked about respondents’ media consumption. After that, we randomly divided respondents into one control and four treatment groups providing the latter with information on (1) the number of convictions of high-level officials by the Higher Anti-Corruption Court; (2) the incidence of corruption at the customs office and in the courts; (3) a combination of treatments (1) and (2); and (4) information on one specific case when high-level officials were sentenced to long prison terms for diverting public money. Then, we asked again about perceptions of corruption and the government’s willingness to fight corruption. We also asked a number of questions about people’s corruption experience, tolerance of corruption, knowledge of anti-corruption agencies, willingness to donate/volunteer and willingness to stay in Ukraine. The second wave was fielded two months after the first one, had around 5,000 respondents and measured perceptions of corruption and the government’s willingness to confront it, as well as respondents’ actual donations/volunteering. 

Figure 4 Corruption perception, by government bodies and agencies (% of respondents who provided a defined answer)

To measure the impact of treatment on respondents’ beliefs and actions, we estimate regressions with posterior beliefs, willingness to donate/volunteer (or actual donations/volunteering in the second wave) as dependent variables and group, ex-ante beliefs, and a number of controls as independent variables.

We find that information on successful prosecutions (treatments 1, 3, and 4) does not affect respondents’ beliefs about the extent of corruption but does increase perceptions of the government’s willingness to fight corruption. The effect is amplified in the second wave. The immediate effect is higher for the general statistics (T1) than for a specific high-level case (T4), but in the second wave the situation is reversed – perhaps because a specific case is better remembered. When we inform people about both the extent of corruption and successful prosecution (T3), we find that this information increases perceived government willingness to fight corruption and does not affect corruption perceptions (nor do the other treatments), so admitting the problem together with the provision of information on tackling it is unlikely to worsen the situation. Information on the incidence of corruption (treatment 2) has no effect on either belief. 

Finally, we do not find an effect of the information treatment either on willingness to donate/volunteer or on actual donations/volunteering in the second wave.

The results suggest that informing citizens about the prosecution of corrupt officials is unlikely to change their beliefs about very high corruption in Ukraine (although their actual encounters with corruption are much lower than their perceptions). At the same time, information about the extent of corruption does not affect people’s beliefs either, if it is accompanied by information on successful prosecution. This suggests that the effectiveness of information campaigns aimed at lowering tolerance of corruption is unlikely to be affected by information on the extent of the problem. Thus, the government should honestly admit the problem and inform citizens about the progress in tackling it. 

Ukraine’s international partners should remember the ‘integrity paradox’ and suggest specific measures to control corruption when it comes to international aid rather than use corruption perceptions as an excuse for reducing their support. 

References

Becker, T, J Lehne, T Mylovanov, G Spagnolo, and N Shapoval (2023), “Anti-Corruption Policies in the Reconstructing of Ukraine”, VoxEU.org, 22 February. 

Čábelková, I, and J Hanousek (2004), “The power of negative thinking: corruption, perception and willingness to bribe in Ukraine”, Applied Economics 36: 383–397.

Corbacho, A, D Gingerich, V Oliveros, and M Ruiz-Vega (2016), “Corruption as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Costa Rica”, American Journal of Political Science 60(4): 1077–1092.

Deryugina, T, A Žaldokas, A Fedyk, Y Gorodnichenko, J Hodson, and I Sologoub (2025), “Rating Government Procurement Markets,” NBER Working Paper 34479.

Gorodnichenko, Y, and M Obstfeld (2026), “You Only Live Twice: A Growth Strategy for Ukraine”, VoxEUorg, 26 January. 

Gorodnichenko, Y, I Sologoub and Y Fedyk (2026), “The Word Is Not Enough: Testing the Effects of Information Treatments on Perceived Corruption in Ukraine”, CEPR Discussion Paper No. 21494. 

Hlatshwayo, S, A Oeking, M Ghazanchyan, D Corvino, A Shukla, and L Leigh (2018), “The Measurement and Macro-Relevance of Corruption: A Big Data Approach,” IMF Working Paper 2018/195.

Mauro, P (1995), “Corruption and Growth”, Quarterly Journal of Economics 110(3): 681–712.

Nell, J, B Weder di Mauro, N Shapoval, and Y Gorodnichenko (2023), “Financing Democracy: Why and How Partners Should Support Ukraine”, VoxEU.org, 13 December. 

Nieuwenburg, P (2007), “The Integrity Paradox”, Public Integrity 9(3): 213-224.

Pittaluga, G, E Seghezza, and P Morelli (2024). “Media Fabrication of Corruption and the Quality of the Political Class: The Case of Italy”, European Journal of Political Economy 84: 102461.

Sarullo, N, Y Gorodnichenko, T Deryugina, J Hodson, I Sologoub, and A Fedyk (2026), “Measuring Corruption from Household Income and Consumption Micro-Data: An International Perspective”, Economic Modelling 160: 107578.

Wedel, J (2023), “Reconstruction Aid for Ukraine: What We Know (or Should Know) from the History of Assistance to Eastern Europe in the 1990s”, VoxEU.org, 14 June.