Corruption Plagues the Poor
The "cancer of corruption" is rampant in poor countries and needs to become a social priority, development economist Ajit Mishra writes in Forbes.
Corruption, or abuse of public office for private gain, hurts the poor and undermines anti-poverty programs, Mishra reports from India. In corrupt societies, poor people are cut off from aid and access to public goods like water, health care, credit and education.
Payments have been made for non-existent public works, money has been disbursed to fictitious (sometimes long dead) persons, employed persons are paid only a fraction of the stipulated wage with the rest being appropriated by officials. This is not an isolated example; anti-poverty programs around the world have encountered similar problems. In some cases, the leakage from corruption can be as high as 80 percent.
Mishra says laws to curb corruption have proven ineffective, and that without methods to apprehend and punish corrupt officials, the growth potential of poor countries will continue to be severely inhibited.
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India has been blown open to
India has been blown open to such dialogue since the recent screening of the award winning 'Slumdog Millionaire'. It unfortunately shows that India is still not the country that it could be. As is the same with many other countries at the moment, such as China and Turkey.
Wealth and corruption has always collected and polluted the middle classes, never irrigating into the areas of economy that perhaps need it the most. This is not a ground breaking notion and has been seen throughout history, Ancient Greece, Rome, Roman England, Spain and the Hapsburg Empire.
Public services should always be treated as a priority. There have been many discussions as to whether civil and political rights trump economic, social and cultural rights. It is important that societies work towards both. It would be a mistake to place one set of rights as a priority over the other. Economic, Social and Cultural rights give people dignity and affirm that their society is forward thinking. Attaching weight to the needs of education and employment and placing them at a parallell with what others refer to as 'basic human rights' is an important change that was discussed in relation to corruption by the UN in the 1950s and 60s .
Corruption is certainly a Cancer that feeds on this belief, when in fact it needs to be stamped out and addressed. A culture of corruption can only be dealt with by creating a dialogue and from this will come a motivation to clean up institutional policy from the inside out. As such this is right place to start.
COMMENTS ON CORRUPTION PLAGUES THE POOR
Comments on the feature post: “Corruption Plagues the Poor” By Claire Adamsick.
The destructive force of bureaucratic corruption emanates from the simple fact that its perpetrators are guided primarily by personal motives rather than the welfare interest of society.However, the extent and severity of the economic effects of corruption depend largely on the developmental stages of the various socio-political institutions in a country. In underdeveloped nations of sub-Saharan Africa, corruption is more damaging to development and economic growth than in industrialized countries were social and economic institutions are better developed, and illegally derived proceeds are more likely to be invested domestically. In contrast, profits from corruption in sub-Saharan Africa usually end up in foreign banks or spent on deplorable activities with nugatory effects on domestic productivity. This leakage of vital investible funds, without equal and compensating inflows, drains the developing economy of its vitality through negative multiplier effects.
When a country’s resources are continually misallocated by corrupt government officials bent on maximizing their short-run selfish interests, development is severely hindered through a multitude of social and economic dislocations: sub-standard goods and services are produced and offered to the poor public at prohibitive prices, choices of public projects are determined not by utility but by the opportunities they present for bribery and graft, inefficient entrepreneurs are superficially sustained at the expense of economic efficiency, and so forth. This was succinctly expressed by a project manager for “The Africa Leadership Forum”, Ayo Aderinwale (1995): “It results in making Africa, in most cases, a cemetery of abandoned projects or what we call “Cathedrals in the Desert”. You find that wrong projects have been pursued at exorbitant prices, and at the end of the day, these projects in themselves benefit nobody but the person who perverted the priorities”
This reality is remarkably damaging. In 1980, for instance, the combined total GDP for sub-Sahara African countries totaled US$292.6 Billions (World Bank, 1997), with some individual countries experiencing negative economic growth rate, and the rest averaged an annual growth rate of less than 3 per cent. The economy of Nigeria, the second biggest in sub-Saharan Africa, provides a striking illustration. In 1980, the country’s GDP of US$93.1 Billion accounted for 31.8 per cent of the combined GDP of sub-Saharan Africa. But with three successive administrations that ushered into power some of the more venal civil servants in the history of the country, GDP declined precipitously to US$27 Billion in 1995.
Regardless of the level of economic development, bureaucratic corruption is always and everywhere detrimental to economic growth, albeit with different degrees of impact. For the underdeveloped nation, the lack of transparency in public administration, and the absence of rule of law and accountability make for a corrupt public sector that invariably contaminates private sector activities. This view, however, is not universally shared. Some studies (leff, 1964; Kennedy, 1997) have proposed that the effect of corruption depends, among others, on four factors: the efficiency of the prevailing economic system, the organizational structure of corruption, how the benefits from corruption are utilized and if corruption encourages market reforms. Corruption is therefore said to promote economic growth and efficiency if the prevailing economic system was inefficient to begin with, the organizational structure of corruption mimicks a free-market, benefits from corruption are reinvested in productive activities and corruption encourages market reform efforts(Kennedy,1997).The salubrious impact of corruption, it is further suggested, is effected through the “grease effect”,i.e. bribing a bureaucrat may be an expedient way to by-pass stifling red tape, and may serve as added incentive to enterprising civil servants to become more productive(leff,1964).
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