Corruption has been one of the major international concerns of the past
decade. It is an issue that affects all countries, rich and poor, in different ways
and to differing degrees. Exactly how corruption affects particular societies
has, however, been the subject of some discussion in the literature. The major
international institutions promoting governance reforms have, for example,
persistently argued that corruption has a direct negative impact upon overall
economic growth levels and can depress the climate for attracting
international investment; although these are far from universally-held
assumptions, even in the mainstream economics literature.
Amidst heightened international concern for tackling the abject poverty which
continues to affect such large sections of humanity (expressed most clearly in
the evolution of the millennium development goals or MDGs), perhaps the
most important concern that has been expressed about corruption is that it
disproportionately affects the poor and marginalized, through excluding them
from access to services or reducing the funds available for direct use in social
programmes. Donor-country fears over corruption in the handling of
development aid monies may also act to erode the political will necessary to
ensure adequate international funding of the actions needed to meet MDG
targets, whilst within Southern countries perceptions of widespread corruption
within political life can act decisively to depress popular support for state
reforms and/or open democratic political systems. Clearly, then, corruption –
its extent, nature, dynamics, causation and how it might be tackled – is an
issue of fundamental importance to those working in the field of international
development.
One of the things noticeable on a first exploration of the literature on
corruption and development is the singular lack of attention that was devoted
to the issue for most of the period since the second world war and, in turn, the
sudden rediscovery of the issue towards the end of the 1980s and the
explosion of international legislative initiatives, institutional formation and
academic work that has occurred since then. Clearly, the end of the bipolar
geopolitical world of the cold war and the onslaught of contemporary
globalization appear to have presented considerable opportunities for
international collaboration in placing the issue at the centre of the international
stage. Nevertheless, those very same global processes also present
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important challenges to the international community in dealing with the issue
because of the difficulties involved in tracing international flows of capital, the
increasing complexity of international criminal networks and non-criminal tax
evasion networks and the complex and hazy lines between the private and
public sectors.
Since the early 1990s large amounts of public money have been spent on the
development of new legislation at national and international levels, the
creation of national anti-corruption programmes and the evolution of anticorruption
departments within just about every major international
development institution. The impact of such measures, however, has been, at
best, partial. As such, whilst the international community should continue to
do what it can to raise the international profile of corruption and how it might
be better combatted, we argue that it is even more important that a more
detailed independent assessment of the effectiveness of existing interventions
is carried out.
Our position is that the first steps towards such a review of international anticorruption
initiatives must involve subjecting the ways in which the issue has
been constructed in the mainstream development arenas to closer scrutiny.
This workshop is intended to be a first step in this direction. As such, this
paper is intended to generate debate about the meaning of corruption, its
complexity, how it relates to particular areas of development policy
intervention and the means whereby it might be combated (if indeed this is
considered feasible or even desirable). Given this, what follows is (i)
deliberately provocative, (ii) deliberately broad and (iii) deliberately polemical.
We thought long and hard about how best to organize this session and in the
end decided to organize it around the presentation of a series of key myths
which we have identified as important amongst those involved in anticorruption
activities and research. Some of these myths relate to the
academic community, some to a kind of general common sense amongst
development practitioners and some to those involved in the implementation
of anti-corruption initiatives. Here, they are organized into four broad sections
dealing with (a) basic definitions, (b) states and markets, (c) actors and anticorruption
initiatives and (d) economic factors