Category Archives: Commentary

What Does “Zero Tolerance” of Corruption Mean? A Comment on Labelle

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Rick’s last couple of posts (here and here) critiqued Bill Gates’ claim that, because corruption in development aid projects as relatively small-scale (allegedly around 2%), it’s therefore a manageable “tax” on aid. Rick asserted (correctly, in my view) that the corruption problem is much bigger, and that the 2% figure is essentially a made-up number. Over at the Huffington Post, Huguette Labelle, the Chair of Transparency International, also responds to Gates. Most of what she says is pretty standard (which doesn’t mean it’s not right). But near the end of her post, she takes a striking position that’s worth thinking about a bit more critically: She argues forcefully against “[a]ccepting low levels of corruption as a pragmatic fact of life,” and instead advocates “[z]ero-tolerance for corruption.” This is quite different from Rick’s argument; Rick pointed out that corruption in development aid projects is not in fact low-level. But Ms. Labelle’s “zero tolerance” stance implies that even if Bill Gates were right about the facts, he would still be wrong in his conclusions. “Zero tolerance” of corruption certainly sounds good. But what exactly does it mean? Continue reading →

Bill Gates on Corruption in Development Projects: Is This How He Ran Microsoft? (Part II)

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In an earlier post I showed that Bill Gates’ supposition that only 2 percent of expenditures in development assistance projects were lost to corruption was wildly off the mark.  I also asserted that such lowball estimates are a major hurdle to more effective aid programs: When corruption losses are lowballed, so are the resources devoted to combating corruption.  If losses are 2 percent of the total budget, then it makes little sense to spend 4 percent of the budget trying to prevent them.  But if losses are 20 percent, then 4 percent spent on audits and investigations is a miserly sum.  If losses are closer to 40 percent, then spending 4 percent borders on criminal negligence.

So where did Gates get the 2 percent figure? It turns out that the likely source for that figure illustrates not only how casually influential people sometimes throw around baseless numbers, but also the perverse incentives that development programs sometimes face to downplay the seriousness of corruption in their projects.

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Turkish Turmoil and Politically-Motivated Anticorruption Enforcement

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At the Project Syndicate website, Dani Rodrik had a very nice commentary last month about the recent power struggles in Turkey, which have included prominent anticorruption actions against senior government figures. These actions have been brought by prosecutors sympathetic to one faction (the Gülenists) against high-ranking figures affiliated with Prime Minister Erdoğan and his party (the AKP). For people like me, who know next to nothing about Turkey, Rodrik’s post provides a nice overview (albeit one with a strong editorial slant). In addition, one passage in Rodrik’s post caught my attention, as it seems related to a common pattern, and problem, in the world of anticorruption enforcement:

The Gülenists have dressed up their campaign against Erdoğan in the guise of a corruption probe. No one who is familiar with Turkey would be surprised to learn that there was large-scale corruption surrounding construction projects. But the corruption probe is clearly politically motivated, and Erdoğan is right to question the prosecutors’ motives. The current round of judicial activism is as much about rooting out corruption as previous rounds were about [other alleged malfeasance] – which is to say, not much at all.

This seems to be a frequently recurring pattern: (1) one party or faction launches an aggressive anticorruption probe against a rival party or faction; (2) it is almost certainly true that most or all of the targets of the corruption investigation did in fact engage in corruption—often serious corruption; yet (3) it is also often the case that those pushing the investigations are doing so not only, or even primarily, out of genuine concern about corruption, but rather as a way to damage a political rival. The most familiar manifestation of this pattern occurs when a new party or faction comes to power and launches corruption investigations against its predecessors or main rivals, as part of what may amount to a purge (or, more mildly, an effort to consolidate power). There’s a plausible argument that this is what’s happening right now in China. The Turkey situation is a bit different, in that a faction that does not currently control the government nonetheless has enough support within the justice system (police, prosecutors, judges, etc.) to launch politically-motivated corruption probes of government officials. Continue reading →

On Differing Understandings of “Corruption”

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I’m sometimes asked how my work on anticorruption (and this blog) relates to the work of my Harvard Law School colleague Larry Lessig, who is the Director of Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics (and who also has a widely-read blog). Under Larry’s leadership, the Safra Center has been focused primarily on “institutional corruption,” and Larry’s 2011 book Republic, Lost likewise focuses on how money corrupts the U.S. Congress. So, what’s the relationship between our two projects?

The short answer is that, although I respect and admire Larry’s work, our corruption projects are about very different things. By itself that’s not terribly interesting, and I wouldn’t bother posting about it except that I think the differences in our projects highlight a longstanding difficulty about the term “corruption” and its use in social science and political advocacy. I don’t want to belabor the issue—when academics run out of ideas, they argue about definitions—but maybe a few quick observations on this point are in order.

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Bill Gates on Corruption in Development Projects: Is This How He Ran Microsoft? (Part I)

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The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has emerged as a major force in the development community – thanks not only to the $28 billion (yes, billion) the Foundation has donated to improve the lives of the world’s poor, but to the license it gives co-chair Bill Gates to speak to development policy. After all, as they used to say of the brokerage firm E.F. Hutton, when a billionaire speaks, people listen — particularly one who gives billions away each year.

Not surprisingly, the letter he and spouse Melinda wrote to serve as the Foundation’s 2014 annual report has been the subject of much attention — excerpted in the Wall Street Journal, quoted in hundreds of press stories and blogs. For the most part, the attention is welcome; the letter nicely puts the lie to several myths that pervade the discussion of poverty and development.  But in a section Microsoft’s founder wrote slaying some common myths about foreign aid, he perpetuates another myth, one that is a major hurdle to more effective aid programs: that corruption in these programs, though undesirable, is relatively minor and manageable. That’s just not true. Continue reading →