"Foreword
Governments across the world aim to deliver better policies and services for people and businesses in a tightening fiscal space. Corruption remains a significant and evolving threat to these efforts, damaging economic growth, distorting public policies, and eroding public trust. In this context, governments should take stronger actions and invest in results-oriented integrity reforms that build resilience to corruption in high corruption risk areas and focus on improving implementation. As they do so, using new technologies and utilising data more effectively will help achieve greater impact (for instance in corruption risk assessment, detecting patterns in large datasets to assist anti-fraud efforts or in internal and external audit, or the processing of large volumes of information such as in the verification of interest and asset disclosures). Governments should also strengthen integrity-enhancing measures in the justice system to ensure accountability for corruption offences. In taking this approach, governments and businesses can benefit from the ‘integrity advantage’, where integrity systems become a key enabler of prosperous economies in which people feel their representatives are safeguarding their interests. The 2026 edition of the Anti-Corruption and Integrity Outlook, the second in this series, aims to help countries harness this integrity advantage. For the first time, the Outlook has a global coverage, presenting data on 37 OECD countries and 25 partner countries. Drawing on new data gathered through the OECD Public Integrity Indicators, it updates OECD analysis of countries’ anticorruption and integrity strategies, and their systems for managing lobbying, conflicts of interest, political finance, and transparency of public information. It also presents new insights into integrity in countries’ justice and disciplinary systems. Finally, in three new focus chapters it analyses trends and tools for mitigating the substantial risks and costs related to fraud, for improving integrity in public procurement, and for combatting organised criminals' use of corruption."