CATCHING UP WITH CORRUPTION

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CATCHING UP WITH CORRUPTION

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• Publié par: uhezyxuk
• Nombre de lectures: 49
• Langue: Français

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MONEY

-

GO

-

ROUND

CATCHING UP WITH CORRUPTION

RAYMOND

BAKER

,

JOHN

CHRISTENSEN

&

NICHOLAS

SHAXSON

n the 1990s, mainstream development theorists and aid agencies finally began to accept the

reality that if they wanted to know why some states fail, or why so many countries are

tormented by persistent poverty, they needed to factor corruption into their equations. The

Berlin-based Transparency International (TI), founded in 1993, deserves much of the credit

for this shift. TI launched the first of its famous Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) series in

1995, and the

Financial Times

took the cue by nominating that year as the International Year

of Corruption. The World Bank, which had previously all but banished the “c” word from its

policy documents, followed TI’s lead after its President, James Wolfensohn, accepted in a

landmark 1996 speech that the Bank needed to deal with “the cancer of corruption.” Now the

Bank considers corruption to be the single greatest obstacle to economic and social

development in the world. The ripple effect from this change of heart has magnified the profile

of the problem throughout the diverse fields of international development policy.

By any measure, this is good news. As many iconoclastic critics of business-as-usual

development policy argued as long as half a century ago, ignoring the broad social and

political frameworks within which economic policy exists is like expecting a fish tank to hold

water without a bottom or sides.

1

Corruption is universal, but its forms vary considerably

across different societies. One would have thought, therefore, that serious social scientists and

practitioners of economic development policy would have factored it into their understanding

early on.

They did not, however, thanks in large part to the way that academic economics shifted

theoretical gears and methodologies after World War II. What had always been called political

economy solidified its separation into political science and an economics profession, which

was driven toward macro approaches in an effort to “harden” itself methodologically. The

result was a sharp positivist, quantitative bias that by definition ruled out serious consideration

of factors that could not be readily measured—corruption being, almost by definition, such a

factor. To this bias was soon added what can only be called a condescending deference to

newly independent countries: It was considered impolite, as well as unhelpful to certain

parochial institutional interests, to delve too deeply into untoward behavior by the elites of

newly sovereign and proud countries.

This explains, at least to some degree, the otherwise astonishing fact that it took half a century

to acknowledge the role corruption plays in the dysfunctional economies of so many poor

countries. It explains why the OECD’s Anti-Bribery Convention entered into force only in

1999, and the UN Convention against Corruption not until 2003. In many developed countries,

bribes were tax-deductible until just a few years ago. Whether it was grasping kleptocrats

stealing billions from the state or disheveled policemen extorting bribes at roadblocks, the

problem should have been diagnosed and dealt with decades earlier.

Not only has the world been slow to wake up to the problem of corruption in development, the

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