Tag Archives: Huguette Labelle

The Persistence of Phony Statistics in Anticorruption Discourse

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Early last month, UN Secretary General António Guterres delivered some brief opening remarks to the Security Council at a meeting on the relationship between corruption and conflict. In these remarks, Secretary General Guterres cited a couple of statistics about the economic costs of corruption: an estimate, attributed to the World Economic Forum (WEF), that the global cost of corruption is $2.6 trillion (or 5% of global GDP), as well as another estimate, attributed to the World Bank, that individuals and businesses cumulatively pay over $1 trillion in bribes each year. And last week, in her opening remarks at the International Anti-Corruption Conference, former Transparency International chair Huguette Labelle repeated these same figures.

Those statistics, as I’ve explained in prior posts (see here and here) are bogus. I realize that Secretary General Guterres’ invocation of those numbers shouldn’t bother me so much, since these figures had no substantive importance in his speech, and the speech itself was just the usual collection of platitudes and bromides about how corruption is bad, how the international community needs to do more to fight it, that the UN is a key player in the global effort against corruption, blah blah blah. Ditto for Ms. Labelle–her speech used these numbers kind of like a rhetorical garnish, to underscore the point that corruption is widespread and harmful, a point with which I very much agree. But just on principle, I feel like it’s important to set the right tone for evidence-based policymaking by eschewing impressive-sounding numbers that do not stand up to even mild scrutiny. Just to recap: Continue reading →

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 →