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The IMF has published a working paper that explores the correlation of crypto-asset usage with indicators of corruption, capital controls, a history of high inflation, and other factors. It finds that crypto-asset usage is significantly and positively associated with higher perceptions of corruption and more intensive capital controls. The results support the case for regulating crypto-assets, including know-your-customer approaches, as opposed to taking a laissez-faire stance. https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2022/03/25/Crypto-Corruption-and-Capital-Controls-Cross-Country-Correlations-515676

"The implementation of Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) in social assistance distribution offers significant advantages, particularly in the context of developing countries. CBDC enables more transparent and traceable transactions, which are crucial steps in reducing corruption and fund misappropriation. Traditional systems often suffer from high transaction costs and slow settlement processes, but with CBDC, both of these issues can be minimized. CBDC also eliminates intermediaries in fund distribution, which is highly relevant in developing countries where distribution chains are often long and complex, increasing the risk of fund loss. "

Pakistan's central bank is considering the launch of a digital currency by 2025, in order to promote financial inclusion and reduce inefficiency and corruption. The central bank is also planning to make its services fully digitized and technology equipped by the year 2030.

"In this work, we put forth a new model for CBDCs and an efficient construction that, for the first time, fully addresses privacy and regulatory compliance simultaneously. Moreover, recognizing the importance of avoiding a single point of failure, our construction is distributed so that all its properties can withstand a suitably bounded minority of participating entities getting corrupted by an adversary. Achieving all the above properties efficiently is technically involved; among others, our construction uses suitable cryptographic tools to thwart manin-the-middle attacks, it showcases a novel traceability mechanism with significant performance gains compared to previously known techniques and, perhaps surprisingly, shows how to obviate Byzantine agreement or broadcast from the optimistic execution path of a payment, something that results in an essentially optimal communication pattern and communication overhead when the sender and receiver are honest. Going beyond "simple" payments, we also discuss how our scheme can facilitate one-off large transfers complying with Know Your Transaction (KYT) disclosure requirements. Our CBDC concept is expressed and realized in the Universal Composition (UC) framework providing in this way a modular and secure way to embed it within a larger financial ecosystem."

The State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) has reportedly launched new Electronic Money Institutions (EMIs) regulations that pave the way towards issuing CBDC by 2025. Deputy Governor Jameel Ahmad said that the SBP the aim of issuing CBDC would be to promote financial inclusion and reduce corruption, and inefficiency.

Kazakhstan authorities are planning to pilot the use smart contract-powered digital tenge to ensure that funds related to public procurement and government subsidies are spent precisely for their intended purposes. The Ministry of Finance and Anti-Corruption Agency as well as other key entities have signed a roadmap to collaborate with the National Bank of Kazakhstan on this particular central bank digital currency (CBDC) use case. This is made possible through the integration with government databases and registries, maintaining white and black lists of legal entities, goods and service categories.