Similar arguments have been made about the role of corruption in the development of Japan and the Asian Tigers. Many of the themes and issues covered in the contributions to the conference – and presented in this book – resonate with the provisions of the Convention.
Editor’s Preface
Also, policy that divides anti-corruption into smaller elements can also work better: continuous work in a number of areas such as international standards, institution and capacity building, knowledge transfer and cooperation, smart economic regulation and reduction of finance of northern origin. incentives may be more effective policies than the trend towards deepening donor intervention and a renewed moral campaign. The editor would also like to thank the contributors for being a pleasure to work with, and my family, especially Christine and Colin, Pascal and Louie and the Makoneses in Zimbabwe.
Acknowledgements
Notes on the Contributors
Ivanovis is a PhD candidate in International Relations at the University of Oxford, where he is researching the impact of EU accession on the politics of anti-corruption in Bulgaria and Romania. Philip Duku Osei is a Fellow of the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica.
List of Abbreviations
HIPC Heavily Indebted Poor Countries IADB Inter-American Development Bank ICC International Chamber of Commerce ICRG International Country Risk Guide IDA International Development Association IDB Inter-American Development Bank. UNCAC United Nations Convention Against Corruption UNDP United Nations Development Program UNO Unión Nacional Opositora (Nicaragua).
Introduction
It is a disciplinary governance concept that follows the report of the Commission for Africa, in the latest chapter of the 'brief history' of corruption in development (Tesh, 1999, cited in Polzer 2001). The history and details of the anti-corruption campaign are further detailed by Ivanov in the next chapter.
Anti-corruption policy and political change in case study countries
The blame of the 'global anti-corruption campaign' (Ivanov, ch. 2) is thus particularly well illustrated in these final chapters on the former Soviet states, as reflected in the standardization and fervor of anti-corruption policy advice, despite evidence of perverse effects. Also apparent is the lack of coherence, which stems from the caustic assumption that other external political pressures, especially those advocating wholesale privatization, are outside of anti-corruption policy and outside the purview of the institutions running the governance campaign.
Donor policy in anti-corruption work by sector and issue Part III contains chapters on donor intervention in governance, to assess
Meanwhile, Bracking writes about a policy sector, development finance, particularly susceptible to corrupt abuses, where an integrated anti-corruption consideration in general policy is long overdue. This exclusivity of anti-corruption policy from other areas of donor intervention is not limited to the aid-generated private sector (as described in Bracking), but has been observed in other donor sectors and policy areas, notably poverty measurement. and aid programs in India (see Mukherjee, 2005).
Concluding the volume
Similarly, US ambassadors often speak on behalf of the host country's population when denouncing corruption. The global agenda's origins lie in the interests of the US government, multinational companies and multilateral donors. The second half of the 1990s witnessed the 'globalization of American anti-corruption standards' (Boeckmann.
Now, moral pressure was crucial to the rise of the global anti-corruption agenda, because no one wanted to be seen as an advocate of corruption. Scholars have questioned the validity of the index given the vague and secretive nature of corruption. Despite some internal disagreements, the various elements of the global anti-corruption agenda are interconnected.
Further research is needed to uncover the full complexity of the global anti-corruption agenda. Stigler's (1971) 'catch' theory of regulation was one highly influential model of determining corruption. No definitive estimate has been made of the total impact of corruption in economic terms.
However, these enormous economic costs of corruption still underestimate the magnitude of corruption's broader impact.
Corruption, Political Development and
Countries suffering from endemic corruption are mainly those countries less advanced in marketization and institutional reforms, such that economic liberalization has mainly created new opportunities for bribery. These countries are among the 30 most corrupt countries in the world (Azerbaijan is the 10th most corrupt); with the level of profits dedicated to bribes at nearly 30 percent (50 percent in Kyrgyzstan) (Hellman et al., 2000b); and weak civil liberties (Freedom House, 2005), due to concentrated political power and stalled development. For example, Moldova, which is not only the poorest country in Europe, with 80 percent of the population falling below the poverty line and per capita income currently estimated at USD 890 in 2005 (CIA, 2006), but also characterized from ethnic conflicts, and colloquially referred to as the 'USSR museum', showing the persistence of Soviet forms of political and economic organization.
While Moldova has a parliamentary system of government, adopted in 2000, the ruling Communist Party still monopolizes power and won in flawed local and regional elections in 2005, due to poor political freedoms (Freedom House, 2005b). Judicial, legislative and executive powers, which have great discretionary scope, are not institutionally separated, but concentrated in traditional hands: it is the former Minister of Internal Affairs of the USSR who rules the country surrounded by the political-economic elite of the Soviet -era. Efforts to liberalize prices and trade have been undermined by political calls for state intervention in the economy, or their informal circumvention, while privatizations have been derailed by cronyism, bureaucratic discrimination and a corresponding lack of international investors.
Institutions function inefficiently due to incompatibility between their functional and institutional frameworks (GRECO, 2003).
Indeed, the fight against corruption in Moldova is seen more as a political weapon to be used against opponents than as a real political goal. Another important pillar of Georgia's anti-corruption policy is reducing the tax burden on small businesses and simplifying the licensing system, which aims to stimulate economic activity and reduce Georgia's shadow economy, which is estimated to be 70 percent of GDP (TI, 2005).
The number of commercial activities that required a license was reduced from 909 to 159, resulting in a more than doubling of government tax revenues in the 19 months to 2005 (IMF, 2005), with a corresponding reduction in bribes to tax officials. President Yeltsin's government introduced reforms that gave local authorities greater autonomy to consolidate the federal system and reverse political concentration, but unfortunately this only increased discretionary power, albeit with variations, within regional institutions and led to their greater takeover by of regionalized companies, helped by close ties between political and economic elites: governors are often at the head of large companies.3 Conversely, President Putin initiated processes of centralization and limited the autonomy of regional political elites in order to reduce local capture (Yakovlev and Zhuravskaya, 2004). . The relative power of firms to capture political and administrative decisions in their favor, as quantified by Yakovlev and Zhuravskaya, shifted from a higher frequency at the regional to a higher frequency at the federal level between the two periods 1996–99 and 2000–03.
In the later period, the most profitable capture, under the Putin regime, was found in the Federal Center, especially for larger financial-industrial groups, extractive firms and enterprises belonging to the federal government (ibid.). Putin's actions, in particular his attacks on the oligarchs and the consolidation of power in the hands of the Federal Center, have led to a real redistribution of political power and the decline of former patrons. However, Information Science for Democracy (indem), in its studies of corruption from 2001 to 2004, show that 43 percent of citizens and 37 percent of business leaders consider corruption to be more important during Putin's presidency than during Yeltsin's. (2005 : 18).
Meanwhile, reforms of administrative revenue collection have served to change only the type of concessions available, rather than the total amount, from a situation where tax breaks were the most preferred preferential treatment in the late 1990s to a situation , where subsidies, subsidized budget loans, budget guarantees for credits and subsidized energy prices have increased significantly (Yakovlev and Zhuravskaya, 2004). During Yeltsin's presidency, in the urgent need to develop the private sector, state assets were dishonestly acquired, even looted, by those who became the 'new rich', the oligarchs, who then became the effective makers of Russian economic policy.
International solidarity is still important for social change, despite the shortcomings of the anti-corruption campaign, as discussed further in the concluding chapter. By making the implementation of the anti-corruption policy a priority, the CC has attracted the support and financial assistance of the international community. This changing historical perception seems to strengthen the case that in Jamaica, corruption has become a perennial problem of public administration under the particular circumstances of the post-Independence period.
However, a review of the Angus Report by former Attorney General Ken Rattray (Rattray, 2002), claimed that the Angus team had made errors of fact and law and sought to excuse Blythe (Jamaica Gleaner, 2003). The company was one of the beneficiaries of a fund created by the government to create jobs in the IT sector using the US dollar windfall generated by the sale of cellular licenses. Reports in the Gleaner newspaper revealed that the executive chairman of the agency was a personal friend of the Prime Minister, while the Prime Minister's son was also contracted to the agency as an information technology specialist (2005).
This scandal therefore resonates at the heart of political life in Jamaica and illustrates how the truncated Westminster system works. Regarding the former, Ryan points to the powerful and independent committees of the US Congress, which go deep into decision-making processes at the executive, legislative and judicial levels (Ryan and Brown 1992: 37).