Poverty often behind the stats on corruption

Science of Life

Several bodies monitor the extent of corruption that exists in countries around the world. The most prestigious and most widely quoted is the Transparency International Corruption Index. This index bases its findings on the perceptions of 3,000 international business people in 30 countries. 

Transparency International and all the other bodies base their indexes on surveys of perceptions of corruption, so the findings are not very scientific. They concentrate on public sector corruption in the form of government agents seeking bribes in order to do their work. Transparency International is an NGO funded by the World Bank, multinational corporations and various countries.  

The 2015 Report of Transparency International Corruption Index ranked 167 countries around the world on their index. Each country is assigned a score on a scale of 0-100 where 0 means very corrupt and 100 means very clean. I will list the top 10 cleanest countries in the world and the top 10 most corrupt countries according to this report – the number after each country is its score. The top 10 cleanest countries were Denmark (91), Finland (90), Sweden (89), New Zealand (88), Netherlands (87), Norway (87), Switzerland (86), Singapore (85), Canada (83), Germany (81), Luxembourg (81) and Britain (81). Ireland with a score of 75 scored a creditable joint 13th place, together with Hong Kong and Japan.

The 10 most corrupt countries on this index where Somalia (8), North Korea (8), Afghanistan (11), Sudan (12), South Sudan (15), Angola (15), Libya (16), Iraq (16), Venezuela (17), Guinea- Bissau (17), Haiti (17), Yemen (18), Turkmenistan (18), Syria (18), Eritrea (18), Uzbekistan (19), Zimbabwe (21), Cambodia (21), Burundi (21), Myanmar/Burma (22) and Democratic Republic of the Congo (22).

Inequality

Sixty eight percent of countries on the index scored less than 50, half of the G20 countries among them. High levels of corruption on the Transparency International Corruption Index correlate with high levels of inequality, poverty and a range of other problems. 

Thus, in Angola for example, near the bottom of the Transparency International Corruption Index, 70% of the population live on two dollars or less per day, but yet the youngest billionaire in Africa lives in Angola. Transparency International reports that over 150,000 Angolan children die annually and that one in six of Angola’s children dies before the age of five. 

Five out of ten of the most corrupt countries on the index rank among the least peaceful countries in the world. And the siphoning off of money through bribery is tightly coupled to higher levels of child labour, child mortality, poor education, human trafficking, environmental degradation and terrorism.

Bribery also inhibits incoming investment from the developed world into any country where bribery is endemic in the public sector. 

For example, a multinational corporation interested in buying and processing the peanut harvest of such a country will probably be put off building the peanut processing plant in that country by the hassle involved in making payoffs at every step of the way in order to get the processing plant built. 

So, the company will instead buy the peanut harvest and ship the peanuts to be processed in another country with a cleaner public service culture. 

The peanut-producing country loses the ongoing employment potential of the processing plant.

Northern Europe emerges well on the Transparency International Corruption Index, which is not surprising since corruption is defined as bribery by public officials. Nevertheless the report notes that just because countries are clean at home, doesn’t mean they are not linked to bribery corruption elsewhere. 

Transparency International reports that the Swedish-Finnish company TeliaSonera is facing allegations that it paid millions of dollars to secure business in Uzbekistan and that half of all OECD countries are violating international obligations to crack down on bribery by their companies abroad.

The Transparency International Corruption Index definition of corruption as government officials seeking illicit payments ignores contrasting ways to define corruption. 

In particular, it doesn’t include concepts of corruption that apply to the West, such as devices to avoid paying legitimate tax and the use of wealth to achieve power. For example, many wealthy business people in Western countries use tax havens and our top private schools are filled with the children of the wealthy who make a network of friends and contacts that provide mutual lifelong material benefits.

Political corruption

I recently took a taxi in Dublin. The driver was a black man who spoke English with a heavy accent. I asked him where he was from originally and he named a prominent African country. I said I had heard reports that political corruption was rife in his country and asked him if this was true and, if so, how would he explain it. He said corruption was widespread in his country because the politicians were paid very small salaries and were not entitled to any pensions if they were not re-elected or when they retired. 

So, he said, the politicians in his country looked on a period in office as an opportunity to ‘make hay while the sun shone’.

The taxi driver had no problem with this tactic and said that he would do the same were he an elected politician in his country. The point of my story is that extenuating circumstances can go some way to explain why bribery is part of the public service culture of so many poor countries. 

Bribery can simply be an informal mechanism to supplement drastically low wages and there would be no need for bribery if people were paid properly. 

The West also believes that lack of democracy promotes corruption, so we make a big fuss about promoting democracy while often ignoring the economic factors, some of which we may have played a big part in causing ourselves, that prevent fair elections occurring in the first place. 

The Transparency International Corruption Index is fine as far as it goes but it doesn’t give an even handed picture of worldwide corruption. 

William Reville is an Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry at UCC http://understandingscience.ucc.ie