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Most call attention to the petty corruption of low-paid civil servants, not to the grand corruption of wealthy multinationals. Most focus on symptoms such as missing resources, not causes such as deregulation of state enterprises. Most talk about bribe-takers, not bribegivers”.

~ Sue Hawley

In his above statement regarding corruption, Hawley’s main point is that when people generally think of corruption they think of it on a small scale. For example, things like corrupt police officers in Mexico and Russia that take brides from people come to mind for most people when they think of corruption. They never think of the wealthy corporation in power as to be corrupt. I was guilty of this myself. As an immigrant from the former Soviet Union I have seen a lot of the “petty corruption of low-paid civil servants” that Hawley is referring to. It is widespread in Russia and is common knowledge to everyone that it exists. Until taking this poverty class and reading the paper “Exporting Corruption” I was not aware of the “grand corruption of wealthy multinationals”. I was under the illusion that the developing countries are the only ones experiencing corruption and thought that no corruption exists in the North. Hawley brought up a lot of good examples that have convinced me otherwise.

The first example of the type of corruption that goes on in the “North” is bribery to gain contracts or concessions and sometimes to get around environmental regulations. Western businesses disguise these bribes as into forms as semi-legal fees or commissions which sometimes makes them hard to detect. They also do not participate in it directly but use local agents to get the job down. This way they are keeping their hands clean and everything is done under secrecy.

Another form of the grand corruption of wealthy multinationals is privatization. It could take form of “large public sector contracts and concessions issued to private companies”. By selling state-owned enterprises to private owners the government has accumulated enormous amounts of money at the expense of the poor. The benefits of this privatization were overestimated and the costs were underestimated. A lot of times the World Bank and the IMF are contributing to the corruption because regulations are not set up to control the privatization. Because of the lack of regulations corruption is allowed to flourish without anybody doing anything about it.

Other examples of the corruption by the West are liberalization that is not carefully managed, private banking and offshore banks that hideaway Third World assets and decentralization that does not “provide adequate resources and training to local governments”. It is easy to see from these examples that the major corruption in the world is going on in the North. The 80 billion dollars per year that Western businesses pay in bribes is a lot worse than what the average police officer accepts in Russia or another country that is stereotyped as corrupt. Hugh Baykey called bribery “a direct transfer of money from the poor to the rich”. Regular people in the developing countries that take part in corruption sometimes have to do that in order to survive. Their country is impoverished to the point that their salaries are not sufficient enough for them to live on. One of the causes of this poverty is the corruption in the West.

After these examples given by Hawley, I see that the excuse of the North for not forgiving the debt of the poor countries because of corruption does not hold up. The corruption that is happening in their own country is on a much larger scale than the corruption in the developing countries. The biggest problem is that people do not understand how true corruption looks like that it is why they are vulnerable to the illusion that I was under just before reading this paper.

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Source by Tatyana Akinsheva