John Rapley - Foreign FocusONCE AGAIN, the spotlight in Jamaica has shone on allegations of corruption. And despite the inevitable calls to move on, we cannot help but wonder how far a country can move if corruption remains a problem.
In fact, the experiences of other countries offer insight to this matter.
First of all, corruption is neither exceptional nor original. Many of the countries that today pride themselves on their low levels of corruption have only recently overcome the problem. As a child, I remember driving along a bumpy old country road in Canada which suddenly widened into a smooth, four-lane highways. A few miles on, it narrowed back to an old country lane. We had just passed through the Liberal constituency.
Equally, when I once described Jamaican garrison politics to an American visitor, he just shrugged and said "Sounds like Mayor Daley's Chicago."
Such old-style politics has largely disappeared from the US and Canada, but only fairly recently.
Even then, there are those who say that all the US has done, for instance, is create a legal framework to regulate corruption. It is now called lobbying, a semi-respectable profession, but the outcome is the same: money rules politics.
Nonetheless, the incidence of corruption tends to be higher in Third World countries. The reason, I think, is straightforward. One can use the economic principle of opportunity cost to account for it.
Opportunity cost refers to the opportunities foregone in any given act.
When a public official engages in a corrupt act, he or she risks losing his job. That is the cost. The opportunities gained by corruption are rather obvious. This is especially so when illegal activities, like the drug trade, produce immense resources for corrupt purposes (which, to the criminal, are merely business expenses). Now when public salaries are low, as they generally are in poor countries, the ratio of gains from corruption to the possible foregone income if one is caught and loses a job, is quite high. In other words, the opportunity cost of being honest is high.
Thus, the enigma to explain is not corruption, but honesty. Since it makes little if any economic sense to be honest, corruption becomes widespread, creating a vicious cycle. With more people engaging in corruption, the likelihood of any one individual getting caught diminishes, further lowering the opportunity cost of corruption.
As an economy develops, though, incomes rise. Consequently, the foregone revenue of someone who loses a job due to corrupt practices rises as well. With it rises the opportunity cost of corruption. All things being equal, its incidence thus declines.
But if corruption minimises with economic development, it is also true that it can minimise development. That is to say, it can squander resources so badly that it erodes investment, and with it growth, thereby locking a country into another vicious cycle of poverty and corruption. One recent study has estimated that the overseas stock of private African capital now exceeds the combined official debt of all African governments. Money borrowed abroad, then shipped abroad by public officials, has impoverished that continent.
PRODUCTIVE TASKS
How, then, does one reduce corruption in order to accelerate the development that will further bring down its incidence? The recent neo-liberal vogue is that by paring back the public sector, one can reduce the opportunities for corruption, thereby encouraging people to concentrate their energies in more productive tasks in the private sector.
However, recent research suggests that reducing the size of government does not reduce corruption. If anything, it may make the battle over increasingly scarce resources more violent.
Thus, it seems the strongest weapon against corruption in a poor country is a strong moral commitment to its reduction. If the economic opportunity cost of corruption is low, a society must then raise its social opportunity cost, with strong denunciation of its practices.
But then the question to ask is, do we really dislike corruption? We all rail against the corruption we see in others, but when given the chance to engage in it, how many of us can honestly say we will turn against it? Perhaps, not everyone casting stones is sinless.
Until we all decide to renounce corruption individually, it is likely to remain widespread, for the simple reason that "Everybody does it" is sufficient excuse for anyone caught in the act.
John Rapley is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Government, UWI, Mona.
