Why fight corruption? Riccardo Hausmann writes: Countries are poor because governments are corrupt. And, unless they ensure that public resources are not stolen, and that public power is not used for private gain, they will remain poor, right?
It certainly is tempting to believe so.
But consider the data. Probably the best measure of corruption is the World Bank’s Control of Corruption Indicator, which has been published since 1996 for over 180 countries. The CCI shows that while rich countries tend to be less corrupt than poor ones, countries that are relatively less corrupt, for their level of development, such as Ghana, Costa Rica, or Denmark, do not grow any faster than others.
Nor do countries that improve in their CCI score, such as Zambia, Macedonia, Uruguay, or New Zealand, grow faster. By contrast, the World Bank’s Government Effectiveness Indicator suggests that countries that, given their income level, have relatively effective governments or improve their performance, do tend to grow faster.
It is easier to mobilize against injustice than for justice. We are more enthusiastic to fight the bad – say, hunger and poverty – than to fight for, say, the kind of growth and development that makes food and sustainable livelihoods plentiful.
Sometimes switching from the “bad” to the corresponding “good” is simply a matter of semantics: to fight against racism is to fight for nondiscrimination. But, in the case of corruption, which is a bad that is caused by the absence of a good, attacking the bad is very different from creating the good.
The good is a capable state: a bureaucracy that can protect the country and its people, keep the peace, enforce rules and contracts, provide infrastructure and social services, regulate economic activity, credibly enter into inter-temporal obligations, and tax society to pay for it all.
Policemen may stop asking for bribes, but that will not make them any better at catching criminals and preventing crime. Curtailing side-payments does not imply the ability to manage concession contracts or collect taxes.
Aside from prosecuting some bad apples, measures to fight corruption typically involve reforming procurement rules, public financial-management systems, and anti-corruption legislation. The underlying assumption is that the new rules, unlike the previous rules, will be enforced.
All organizations need to be perceived as legitimate. They can create this perception by actually performing the function for which they were created, which is difficult. Alternatively, they can borrow from the natural world a strategy called isomorphic mimicry: just as non-poisonous snakes evolve to resemble a poisonous species, organizations can make themselves look like institutions in other places that are perceived as legitimate.
And this is what the anti-corruption agenda often ends up stimulating: the creation of organizations that are more obsessed with abiding by the new and burdensome processes than they are with achieving their stated goals.
The development of a capable state that is accountable and ruled by law is one of the crowning achievements of human civilization. It involves the creation of a shared sense of “us,” an imagined community on whose behalf the state acts.
This is not an easy task when societies are deeply divided by ethnicity, religion, or social status. After all, who is the state for? All Iraqis or just the Shia among them? All Kenyans or just the Kikuyu?
The fight against corruption mobilizes all of us because we want to do away with evil and injustice. But we should remember that casting the bad into the sea does not imply the sudden appearance on our shores of the good that we need.
