Corruption
Description: ARVIND K. JAIN* Given temptation, it is surprising that corruption is not more prevalent. In an environment where wealth is the most important measure of success, can public officials be blamed for wanting to enrich themselves by exploiting their powers? By definition, corruption is: “… acts in which public power is used for personal gains in a manner that contravenes the rules of the game” (Jain 2001, 73). If corruption has been controlled, it is due to the ability of civil society and public institutions to check the behavior of public officials. When unchecked, corruption is accompanied by misallocation of resources, economic stagnation, social and economic disparities and, eventually, political violence. The first decade of this century provides ample casual evidence of these effects. Haiti, with a legacy of corrupt leaders, remains one of the poorest countries in the world; Nigeria, despite its oil reserves, has a stagnant economy; 40 percent of the population in India lives below poverty line while the richest family in the country builds a two-billion-dollar family residence; Tunisia, in spite of respectable growth rates for a number of years, found its corrupt leader unceremoniously overthrown in early 2011. To understand corruption, we must first recognize what form corruption takes, what allows it to thrive, what consequences it can have on the society and what measures have been successful in controlling corruption. What is corruption? Like the heads of Hydra’s dragon, corruption presents itself in many shapes though all originate from the same body politic. Forms of corruption differ from one another in terms of both the source of power that is exploited and the impact they have on the economy and the society. Let us look at two forms of corruption, each occupying extreme positions on a scale of corrupt activities. At one end is a somewhat benign example, such as a doorman asking for a small tip to let you into the office.At the other end, we find a more malignant example of a leader treating society’s assets as personal property. Most people are exposed to corruption in its benign form when they have to pay a bribe to receive a service from a government official. Quite often, the service would have been a right of the citizen; the bureaucrat may merely have discretion over imposing some costs (in the form of delays and opportunity costs of permit denial) on the citizen before granting the service. A bribe is demanded to reduce that cost. This form of bureaucratic corruption usually occurs once a regulatory regime has been determined and the resource allocation decisions have been made – the bureaucrat is, in fact, interfering with the implementation of decisions. Economic models of bureaucratic corruption must tackle issues of information asymmetry (which agents are corrupt and which will participate in propagating corruption) and uncertainties about costs (associated with probabilities and penalties of detection, as well as with the purchase of loyalties of other agents) in addition to all the usual unknowns such as demand and supply. Rose-Ackerman (1978), Shleifer and Vishny (1993), Dabla-Norris (2002), Ahlin and Bose (2007), Lambert-Mogiliansky et al. (2007), among many others, provide examples of such models. Acemoglu and Verdier (2000) illustrate the role of corruption in governments’ attempts to correct market failures. At the other extreme, “political” or “grand” corruption arises from a rogue dictator’s control over a country’s resource allocation and expenditure decisions. This leader will maximize his personal wealth rather than the welfare of the population. Of necessity, he will have to have acquired an almost complete control of political powers within the country. A portion of the wealth amassed through corruption is used to purchase the loyalty of those who will help the dictator remain in power and to undermine the CORRUPTION * Concordia University, Montreal. civic society and publ