Defining Corruption: What Do Readers Say?

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Recent posts have treated readers to a discussion of what corruption means.  Professor Rothstein suggested coming at it from its opposite and offered “impartiality” so corruption would mean the absence of impartiality or bias. [Note: I had flubbed Prof. Rothstein’s view in the original text as per his comment below.] Professor Johnson argued that at its core corruption is about an imbalance of power and suggested tying the definition to notions of “justice.” Transparency International’s “abuse of entrusted power for private gain” was also examined.

I think it time for GAB readers to be heard. Rather than asking which one of these definitions they prefer, or whether they have another candidate, however, I thought it more interesting to see how a definition of corruption helps them judge actual conduct in the real world. 

Below are six cases where at least some have alleged corruption was afoot. What say, GAB readers? Do any of the cases described below involve corruption as you define it?

A yea or nay on each in a comment to this post will suffice. Extra credit for explaining how one of the definitions proffered helped you decide. Lifetime subscription to GAB at the current rate to the best entry or entries. How each played out in court and in the court of public opinion will be revealed in a future post.

Case 1. To defeat a motion of no confidence, Vanuatu’s Unity of Change government offered two MPs parliamentary appointments in return for withdrawing their support for the motion.  Another MP was offered the position of Minister of Health, and a fourth Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Fisheries. All four accepted the offers, and the government defeated the motion. Bribery?

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New Podcast Episode, Featuring Peter Solmssen

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. In this week’s episode, I interview Peter Solmssen, an American lawyer who currently serves as the chair of the International Bar Association’s Subcommittee on Non-Trial Resolutions of Bribery Cases, and who previous served as the General Counsel of the Siemens Corporation in the immediate aftermath of Siemens’ foreign bribery scandal in 2007-2008. In our interview, Mr. Solmssen discusses his perspective on the Siemens case, including both how and why a successful and large company like Siemens developed systematic bribery schemes in the first place, and how Siemens new leadership in the aftermath of the scandal took steps to clean up the company and change its culture. Our conversation then moves from the Siemens case to broader questions concerning how best to combat transnational bribery, whether statutes like the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) are effective, and the role of the private sector in promoting ethics and integrity.
You can also find both this episode and an archive of prior episodes at the following locations:
KickBack is a collaborative effort between GAB and the ICRN. If you like it, please subscribe/follow, and tell all your friends! And if you have suggestions for voices you’d like to hear on the podcast, just send me a message and let me know.

Will Afghanistan’s New Taliban Rulers Govern Corruptly?

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On August 15, 2021, the Taliban marched into Kabul unopposed, toppling the Western-backed government. The Taliban came to power in a very corrupt country. Afghan police regularly used informal checkpoints to extort truck drivers. Education and banking were also rife with corruption. Some estimates put the amount of bribes paid annually in Afghanistan at somewhere between $2 and $5 billion, or about 13 percent of the country’s GDP. Afghan military commanders siphoned off huge amounts of money by listing non-existent soldiers in their units, and then pocketing the salaries of these “ghost soldiers.” And on top of all this, former president Ashraf Ghani allegedly stole over $100 million on his way out of Afghanistan. From top to bottom, Afghanistan had a major corruption problem. 

The Taliban, by contrast, cultivated a reputation for relatively clean government. During the Taliban’s previous reign, from 1996 until 2001, bribes were uncommon, and the justice system was viewed as comparatively honest (and certainly less corrupt than that of the Western-backed government established after the Taliban’s ouster). Over the last two decades, the justice administered by Taliban judges in areas under Taliban control has been popular among many Afghans precisely because they perceive it as less corrupt and more efficient. This may explain why, despite the Taliban’s extremism and abysmal human rights record, the group was viewed favorably by many ordinary Afghans—at least when contrasted with the Western-backed government. Many commentators have suggested this factor contributed to the Taliban’s takeover of the country (see here and here). And since the Taliban has come to power, early reports suggest that it is governing in a relatedly non-corrupt manner. For example, business owners in Kabul—often the targets of shakedowns by security forces under the Ghani government—note that Taliban security forces check in on them regularly to offer help with security, without demanding bribes. Afghans also report that the police no longer extort bribe payments from truckers, who now just pay a single toll to the Taliban. More generally, citizens in places like Kabul have offered positive preliminary assessments, regarding the comparatively lower corruption of the new Taliban government.

Does this mean that, notwithstanding the Taliban’s terrible record on other issues, the Taliban government is likely to continue governing the country relatively cleanly? There is no way to know, but there are good reasons to be skeptical. Those who welcomed the Taliban as a less corrupt alternative to the Western-backed government are likely to be disappointed.

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Guest Post: Brazil’s Bill Restricting Cash Transactions Would Help Fight Corruption

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Today’s guest post is from Marcelo Costenaro Cavali, a Brazilian Federal Judge in the District Court of Sao Paolo and a Professor of Criminal Law at the FGV Sao Paolo law faculty.

Criminals like to use cash because it is widely accepted, anonymous, and virtually impossible to track. Paying bribes in cash, for example, may be less risky than using more easily traceable electronic transfers. For this reason, many countries have enacted, or are considering, legislation restricting the use or possession of cash in large quantities. For example, in Brazil, the Senate is currently considering a bill that would prohibit the use of cash for all real estate transactions and for all other transactions over 10,000 Brazilian reais (approximately 1,900 US$); the bill would further prohibit carrying over 100,000 reais (approximately 19,000 US$) and possessing over 300,000 reais (approximately 57,000 US$) in cash, except in specific situations. (The bill would leave the implementation and enforcement to the Brazilian Financial Intelligence Unit (COAF), which would also have the power to adjust the threshold amounts.) Such limits on holding and using cash can be an effective means for disrupting money laundering, corruption, and tax evasion, and this bill, if passed, could therefore be an important step forward in Brazil’s fight against corruption and other economic crimes. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Succeeding or Failing… at What?

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Today’s guest post is from Michael Johnston, Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Colgate University:

A bracing and long overdue debate has surfaced recently on this and other blogs, focusing primarily upon the issue of whether anticorruption efforts have failed but also raising important questions about definitions, theory, analytical methods and—not least—the norms of scholarly discourse. Entries by Bo Rothstein, Matthew Stephenson, Robert Barrington, and Paul Heywood offer searching critiques and a number of cautionary tales that I will certainly take to heart.

The discussions raise many more questions than I can analyze in this short discussion, but as for the issue that launched the exchange—whether many or most anticorruption efforts have failed—my answer is to raise another question: How would we know? To that I add a critical follow-up: If we were to see significant success, what might it look like? The first question, I suggest, has no single clear-cut answer, and never will. As for the second: In my view success would not revolve around levels of corruption, but about the prevalence of justice. Continue reading →

Keep the Dogmatic Privatization Argument Out of Style

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It used to be trendy to talk about privatization as the solution for corruption. The World Bank, for example, declared back in 1997 that “any reform that increases the competitiveness of the economy will reduce incentives for corrupt behavior. Thus policies that lower controls on foreign trade, remove entry barriers to private industry, and privatize state firms in a way that ensures competition will all support the fight [against corruption].” (See also here, here, and here.) Although this theory declined rapidly after its peak in the 1990s, anticorruption policy ideas, like fashion, seem to be cyclical. Even as the privatization dogma has become démodé in Western anticorruption circles, it has gained new life elsewhere. As “privatization as a solution to corruption” debates reemerge in India and the Philippines, it’s worth reexamining the flaws in such policy proposals that made them fall out of favor twenty years ago.

The logic behind the idea that privatization inherently(or at least usually)decreases corruption is the notion that private shareholders are more interested than government bureaucrats in the efficient usage of whatever resources they control, and are therefore more likely to crack down on corruption. Relatedly, competition in the private market should favor those entities that can provide a service most efficiently—and if graft is inefficient, as many believe, market competition should drive corruption down. On top of this, private organizations also reduce corruption by offering more competitive wages, which means that employees aren’t forced to turn to corrupt means to supplement their incomes.

That’s the theory. The problem is that it isn’t supported by empirical evidence. Starting in the early 2000s and continuing well into the present, scholarship examining the aftermath of the privatization wave of the 1990s has repeatedly found that privatization has been largely unhelpful, and in some cases outright detrimental, to efforts to bring corruption under control (see here, here, here, here, here and here, to cite but a few sources). Why is this? Three main problems stand out:

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Is Italy Backtracking on the Fight Against Foreign Bribery?

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Press reports, informed commentary, and the recent acquittal of ENI and Royal Dutch Shell despite overwhelming evidence they bribed Nigerian officials provide alarming evidence that Italy’s commitment to curbing foreign bribery is waning.

That commitment was never that strong to begin with. Although bound by the OECD Antibribery Convention to investigate and prosecute foreign bribery cases, in 2011 the OECD Working Group on Bribery found Italy had done little to comply. In the decade since ratifying the convention, only a few dozen cases had been brought, almost all against individuals for small-time bribery, and most had ended in acquittals. This dismal record was not surprising, the Working Group observed, given no one had been trained on how to investigate foreign bribery cases, and no public prosecutor’s office specialized in such cases.

The one bright spot the Working Group found was the Milan office of the public prosecutor.  It had aggressively pursued foreign bribery cases, opening by far the lion’s share of cases, including all those where a corporation was involved. Its future is now in doubt.

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Anticorruption Bibliography–October 2021 Update

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An updated version of my anticorruption bibliography is available from my faculty webpage. A direct link to the pdf of the full bibliography is here, and a list of the new sources added in this update is here. Additionally, the bibliography is available in more user-friendly, searchable from at Global Integrity’s Anti-Corruption Corpus website.

As always, I welcome suggestions for other sources that are not yet included, including any papers GAB readers have written.

New Research on the Effect of Income and Asset Disclosures

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GAB readers have recently been treated to a vigorous back-and-forth on the efficacy of anticorruption laws. Gothenburg University Professor Rothstein sharply questions their value whereas GAB editor-in- chief Matthew Stephenson and Sussex Professor and anticorruption practitioner Robert Barrington take issue with such a sweeping claim, Professor Barrington pointing to the U.K. 2010 Bribery Act as an example of an effective legal reform.

In today’s Guest Post, George Washington University Assistant Professor David Szakonyi offers additional evidence that anticorruption laws make a difference — and in a surprising place: the Russian Federation. Exploiting a 2015 change in law that required those running for local office to disclose their income and assets (the kind of natural experiment the Nobel committee lauded when awarding this year’s prize in economics), he shows how disclosures affected different individuals’ willingness to seek office.

Professor Szakonyi is also a co-founder of the Anti-Corruption Data Collective. His academic research focuses on corruption and political economy in Russia, Western Europe, and the United States. He is a Research Fellow at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow.

There are few anti-corruption reforms as widespread as mandating officials submit income and asset disclosures. According to the World Bank, 161 out of 176 countries surveyed have some sort of disclosure system in place. Yet there still is deep skepticism that forcing public officials to disclose their personal wealth makes much of an impact. Officials have every incentive to lie on their forms, and many fail to submit them entirely. Others stash their assets in the names of relatives or cloak their ownership in offshore chains out of the reach of those tasked with oversight. In brief, verification is tough. Given all the opportunities for evasion, are disclosures anything more than an anti-corruption paper tiger?

My forthcoming paper at the American Journal of Political Science provides some encouraging evidence: requiring income and asset disclosures deters those prone to corruption from seeking office. The case studied is Russia, which perhaps surprisingly has one of the most comprehensive anti-corruption disclosure laws on the books anywhere in the world. Each year over 2 million public officials must submit detailed reports to oversight commissions about their income and assets, as well as those of their spouses and dependent children. A portion of every official’s disclosure is posted online for the general public to access.

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New Podcast Episode, Featuring Will Fitzgibbon

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. In this week’s episode, my colleague Christopher Starke interviews Will Fitzgibbon, a senior reporter with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), about the Pandora Papers leak and what this evidence, and the associated reporting, reveals about international financial secrecy and the ways in which this system facilitates illicit financial flows and enables corruption, tax evasion, and organized crime. You can also find both this episode and an archive of prior episodes at the following locations:

KickBack is a collaborative effort between GAB and the ICRN. If you like it, please subscribe/follow, and tell all your friends! And if you have suggestions for voices you’d like to hear on the podcast, just send me a message and let me know.