Tag Archives: deregulation

From the Permit Raj to the Billionaire Raj: Corruption, Liberalization, and Income Inequality in India

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For over a year, tens of thousands of Indian farmers camped on the highways of New Delhi in protest of three new agricultural laws heralded by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Those laws proposed a national framework for liberalizing the country’s heavily-regulated agricultural markets, allowing farmers to sell their crop yields on the private market rather than selling at fixed prices in government-regulated wholesale markets. While Modi and other proponents of the laws argued that these regulated markets failed to improve farmers’ livelihoods and were rife with corruption, opponents feared that the laws would create an unregulated free market dominated by large, exploitative corporations. On September 5, the protests against the laws culminated in a mass rally of over half a million farmers. Two months later, Modi announced that he would be repealing the laws, a stunning public reversal that few had expected from the ordinarily unyielding Prime Minister. 

To put these most recent developments in a broader context, the dispute over the farm laws showcases a debate over liberalization and deregulation in India that has been raging for more than half a century. It is a story not only of competing visions for the country’s economy, but also of the deep interrelation between corruption and income inequality. As the agriculture fight demonstrates, liberalization has been offered as a mechanism to solve both problems. But a closer look at India’s experience with liberalization complicates this theory. Liberalization may have helped fuel the country’s precipitous economic rise, but it only further exacerbated income inequality while further entrenching the systems of corruption that favor the country’s wealthy elite. At best, unchecked liberalization in India has simply repackaged corruption in new forms; at worst, it has allowed corruption to flourish.

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On the Political Subtext of Definition Debates, Part 1: Public vs. Private Sector Corruption

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Since I started working in the anticorruption field a few years back, I’ve noticed that a substantial amount of the discussion in this field—at conferences, in journals, on blogs like this one, etc.—is given over to debates about definition and measurement. This is something I’ve discussed, and complained about, before (see here, here, and here)—though I concede that every time I bring this up, I’m contributing to the very problem I’m complaining about.

Now, one of the reasons there’s so much debate about definition and measurement in this field is because corruption is, relative to other concepts, particularly difficult to define and measure. Another reason—in my mind the main one—is that while “corruption” is sometimes used as a purely descriptive term (that is, to describe certain conduct, which we can try to measure empirically), it is also an evaluative/normative term—one that connotes “bad” behavior of a certain sort. So any attempt to define corruption (for purposes of positive analysis or empirical research) will often, perhaps inevitably, suggest a normative position on the sorts of conduct, people, or institutions that ought to be condemned.

That’s not an original point, nor even a terribly interesting one. But the more of these “what is corruption” conversations I’ve been a part of, the more I get the sense that there’s a more specific political/ideological subtext to some of the arguments about how corruption should be defined. Nobody ever articulates these ideas in so many words, and so I may be way off base, but I’m going to offer up some conjectures, in this post and in the next one, about what I sense is the ideological subtext of some of these definitional debates.

Here I’ll focus on a fairly narrow issue: Should those organizations that focus on (and sometimes try to measure) “corruption” emphasize forms of corruption that involve the public sector (government, or entities with a sufficiently close connection with government to be considered essentially public instrumentalities), or should the “anticorruption agenda”—as well as the definition and measurement of corruption—also include purely private sector corruption? Continue reading →