Corruption is on the up.
By IMAN KURDI | ARAB NEWS
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That is the overall conclusion of a report published by the NGO Transparency International on Thursday, to coincide with the UN's International Anti-Corruption Day. It is a huge study. Some 91,500 people were questionned in 86 countries and territories on their experience of paying bribes and their opinions on the prevalence of corruption in a number of institutions.
Regionally, the Middle East and North Africa fared rather badly. They came second, after Sub-Saharan Africa, in terms of the number of people reporting having paid bribes over the last year: 36 percent of respondents said they had resported to paying bribes in order to get things done or to avoid problems. In Sub-Saharan Africa, such is the insiduousness of bribery that more than one in two reported paying bribes.
That bribery is widespread in the Middle East will not come as a huge surprise to anyone who has lived in the region. It is, however, useful to be able to put a figure on something that happens under the table and to be able to situate the region internationally. Unfortunately given that only five countries in the Middle East and Africa were surveyed – Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Morocco and Palestine – the results cannot really be taken to adequately represent the region.
But as it happens, Transparency International also publishes a global corruption perceptions index. This index, as the name indicates, is not a survey but an index measure of corruption per country ranging from 0 for very corrupt to 9 for no corruption. It is compiled using data collected by businesses, banks and agencies working in each country.
If red is for corrupt, yellow for not corrupt and orange for something in between, then the 2010 index published last October places most countries of the GCC in the orange zone, ranging from 4.5 for Kuwait to an astounding 7.7 for Qatar. Several neighboring Arab countries are, however, firmly entrenched in the red zone: Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon all score less than 3 on the scale, and similarly in Africa, Algeria, Libya and Sudan also score less than 3, with Egypt and Morocco faring slightly better with scores of 3.1 and 3.4, while Tunisia and Jordan fall within the same ball park as the GCC countries. Iraq and Sudan even manage to fall into the bottom seven. It's not exactly glorious.
But who are the stars? Who are the countries that achieve best practice in terms of erradicating corruption? The top five in this table of honour are Denmark, New Zealand, Singapore, Finland and Sweden, each scoring 9.2 or 9.3 on the scale. And if we look again at the latest survey, the only country where people reported no bribery at all in the last year was Denmark. Quite an achievement.
Looking at that list I am struck by how these are countries with high GDP per capita (all of them are in the top 20, with the exception of New Zealand which is ranked 24 by the World Bank), with very high standards in education (Finland, Singapore and New Zealand were ranked 2, 4 and 6 respectively in the latest OECD education rankings) and with a high quality of living (all of them have capital cities that score more than 100 in the latest Mercer Quality of Living survey). Are these the magic ingredients that lead to greater transparency? Or does greater transparency translate into higher standards of living? It would certainly seem that the more a country develops economically, politically and socially, the less room there is for corruption.
What struck me most about the bribery survey is that it looked at petty bribery rather than the big kickbacks that I usually associate with the word corruption. It considered the impact of bribery on people's daily lives. Do you need to resort to bribery in order to get things done? Do you need to pay bribes in order to avoid getting into or to get out of trouble? Do you have to pay someone in order to get your file to the top of the pile? For one in four of the almost 100,000 people questioned the answer is a resounding yes.
Petty bribes affect the poor more than the rich. They are the mark of failed economic and political systems that can only function when the wheels are oiled by bribes. Countries with the highest levels of bribery are usually poor, wore-torn or politically unstable or a mixture of the three, but as the report has shown, bribery is widespread and commonplace all over the globe. Moreover, the report finds that "poorer people are twice as likely to pay bribes for basic services such as education than wealthier people. "
But what can be done? More than half of respondents thought that government action to stop corruption is ineffective. Couple that with the belief held by 80 percent of those questioned that political parties are corrupt and you get an idea of the distrust that is felt towards those making the political decisions.
This report makes very depressing reading. First, the trend upward: The majority of respondents believe corruption has risen over the last three years. This is particularly the case in Western Europe and North America. Second, the confirmation that the poor pay more bribes than the relatively rich. And thirdly, that the police and political parties are considered the most corrupt institutions. Put those three factors together and you get a seriously discouraging picture.
(ik511@hotmail.com)
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