Endemic global corruption is holding back free-market growth and slowing development that might otherwise release millions of people from poverty, analysts at the eighth International Anticorruption Conference said Monday.
Slowing corruption, however, remains painfully difficult not only in poor countries burdened with underpaid civil servants and a culture of bribe-taking but also in rich countries whose corporations see paying bribes, particularly in the Third World, as the way to compete internationally.
“Corruption is a fact of life in all corners of the globe,” said Lynda Chalker, a former British minister of state and now an adviser to the United Kingdom chapter of Transparency International, the leading global anti-corruption non-profit organization.
“There is no magic wand at our disposal,” she told more than a thousand delegates from 90 countries at the conference, which runs through Thursday in Lima.
Latin America, long a hotbed of corruption and dictatorship, has seen a move toward democratic government and free markets during the past two decades.
Corruption, however, has scarcely slowed. Earlier this year, former Ecuadoran President Abdala Bucaram was tossed from office on charges rooted in his administration’s widespread looting of the country, just the most recent of a long line of Latin American leaders dumped for smaller-scale stealing.
In a region where democracy is beginning to flourish and outrage against official corruption has toppled leaders, the norm remains payoffs to police, incentives worked into international bids and fees to get shipments out of customs. Such corruption persists, speakers at the conference said Monday, largely because political leaders have done little to signal they won’t stand for it.
In Thailand, government officials freely told journalists recently that they were open to taking “payments” for services, said Shang Jin-Wei, a Harvard corruption researcher. The officials didn’t consider such bribery a problem as long as the officials themselves didn’t ask for the payments or publish a schedule of fees for their services, he said.
“Politicians will not usually make decisions that will lead to their downfall as political leaders,” observed Edmundo Orellana, attorney general of Honduras.
There, Orellana said, public pressure to end corruption led to creation of a public minister’s office and is allowing penalties for corruption to be increased. But “if it depended on the executive branch, nothing would have happened at all,” he said.
Another factor causing corruption is low pay for civil servants such as police and customs officers, who sometimes make only a few hundred dollars a month.
“Without a competent, dedicated and well-compensated civil service it is impossible to check corruption,” said Shahid Javed Burki, the World Bank’s vice president for Latin America and the Caribbean.
In many countries, “public office is seen as an opportunity for personal gain,” he said, and the public “is viewed as a multitude of clients to be exploited whenever the occasion arises.”
Moving public workers from that mindset to one of performing as public trustees “is a huge task,” he said.
Nonetheless, there have been successes. Peru in 1990 began a major crackdown on corruption and inefficiency in its customs service. By 1995 it had boosted revenue from $625 million to $2.6 billion a year and reduced the average time for a shipment to clear customs from five days to two hours.
Seventy percent of Peruvian customs workers are professionally trained, up from 2 percent in 1990, and any evidence of corruption is grounds for immediate firing, said James Shaver, general secretary of the World Customs Organization.
Conference attendees laughed a few minutes later, however, when conference officials announced that any delegates who had arrived in Peru without the requisite visa would need to pay $12 to recover their passport–plus an additional 10 soles, an unexplained local fee equivalent to a little less than $4.
Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori had promised in an opening address Sunday that his country’s successes are “indisputable proof that there is sufficient moral force” to confront corruption, which he called “the monster that gorges on our resources.”
Vito Tanzi, an Italian official of the International Monetary Fund, criticized corruption Monday as a brake on growth that “distorts the economic relationships between countries” and diverts development dollars from the poor they were intended to benefit.
International agencies, including the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, recently have started making good on threats to withhold aid to nations where corruption is damaging development, agreeing to withdraw promised loans to Kenya.
European Union members are considering regulations that would criminalize bribery, overturn tax deductions for bribes paid abroad and forbid corporations found guilty of bribery overseas from bidding on contracts at home.
Mark Pieth, a Swiss representative of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, said he expected at least some European nations to implement such new rules as laws by the end of 1998.
