Introduction

The spread of Covid-19 disease has imposed enormous socio-economic losses (Lenzen et al., 2020) over a million human lives and serious distributional conflicts with tremendous inequitable hardships—both mental and financial—on people worldwide (Esseau-Thomas et al., 2022; Furceri et al., 2020). While the rich and well-to-do may have experienced some inconveniences but will continue their lifestyles, life will never be the same for billions of the poor and middle-class people throughout the world. The top responsibilities of all governments are saving and protecting lives and properties and ensuring the basic needs of people are met. Most governments have tried to overcome these dramatic adverse impacts on millions of lives and their daily survival needs. This has been done through a wide range of economic measures whose approval has followed one another during the highly uncertain evolution of the COVID-19 Pandemic. These measures include fiscal interventions such as tax reliefs, additional public spending (also through dedicated extrabudgetary funds), loans and loan guaranteesFootnote1. While economic measures have helped some affected populations, billions – indeed—are still suffering and struggling to meet some of their basic survival needs, mostly in Africa and Asia. Yet, the million plus lives lost to the Covid-19 will never be recovered (Farazmand, 2023c/forthcoming 2023a,b; Farazmand & Danaeefard 2021).

The extraordinary and sudden nature of the Pandemic crisis has imposed special attention on the size and timeliness of these ad hockery fiscal responses meeting “the need of the moment” (Schick, 2010, p. 9). Instead, ensuring public access to clear, comprehensive, reliable and timely information about this fiscal effort was considered a lower priority, at least in the early phase of the pandemic (International Budget Partnership, 2021). This happened, despite transparency being supposedly considered “the most important of the principles for budget making and execution in a democratic nation” (Mikesell & Mullins, 2011, p. 3). Indeed, scholars highlight that government transparency fosters decision makers’ accountability and citizens’ participation (Alt, 2019; Capasso et al., 2021; Cicatiello et al., 2018), thereby determining a wide range of desirable effects (De Renzio & Wehner, 2017).

Concluding Remarks

“Corruption is an extremely complex issue with many dimensions and consequences. They include: human nature, individual or group motivation, lack of adequate understanding of complex legal and institutional measures or safeguards, vagueness and numerous loopholes in anti-corruption measures or laws, cultural differences, moral and ethical belief systems, liberal interpretations of various policies and administrative procedures, contradictory policies or administrative processes, and overlapping or contradictory bases of ethical principles of measures of conducts in public governance and administration systems within single and across countries worldwide. This means a lot more monumental works are need to be done by human agents with high integrity in governments and administrative systems around the world” (Farazmand, 2023b).

The articles in this Special Mini-Symposium Issue show how the recent global health crisis and the related need to timely provide additional resources put significant challenges to policymakers which troubled the functioning of anti-corruption and transparency practices. The unprecedented circumstances arising from the spread of COVID-19 disease evidence the fundamental necessity to find a compromise between the capacity of governments to adopt timely responses and the implementation of appropriate safeguards to ensure transparency and accountability under globalization (Farazmand, 2002), also beyond ordinary practice. Given the multiplication of disastrous events we have unfortunately been witnessing the last two and a half years, this Special Symposium Issue appears to be more than ever extremely relevant for the Post-Pandemic capacity building with necessary mitigating anti-corruption measures, and for future scholarly research. And we always hope the challenges of corruption as a dangerous chronic disease as well as other pandemic crises never escape the attention of policy makers and administrative leaders.