Most call attention to the petty corruption of low-paid civil servants, not the grand corruption of wealthy multinationals. Most focus on symptoms like lack of resources, not causes like deregulation of state-owned companies. Most talk about takers, not takers.”
~Sue Hawley
In his earlier statement on corruption, Hawley’s main point is that when people generally think of corruption, they do so on a small scale. For example, things like crooked cops in Mexico and Russia taking people’s girlfriends come to mind when most people think of corruption. They never think that the rich corporation in power is corrupt. I myself was guilty of this. As an immigrant from the former Soviet Union, I have seen much of the “petty corruption of underpaid civil servants” that Hawley refers to. It is widespread in Russia and it is common knowledge to everyone that it exists. Until I took this class of poverty and read the article “Exporting corruption”, I was not aware of the “great corruption of the rich multinationals”. I was under the illusion that developing countries are the only ones experiencing corruption and I thought there is no such thing as corruption in the North. Hawley mentioned many good examples that convinced me otherwise.
The first example of the type of corruption that occurs in the “North” is bribery to obtain contracts or concessions and sometimes to circumvent environmental regulations. Western companies disguise these snippets on forms as semi-legal fees or commissions, sometimes making them hard to spot. They also do not participate directly, instead using local agents to get the job. In this way, hands are kept clean and everything is done under secrecy.
Another form of grand corruption by rich multinationals is privatization. It could take the form of “large public sector contracts and concessions awarded to private companies.” By selling off state-owned companies to private owners, the government has accumulated vast amounts of money at the expense of the poor. The benefits of this privatization were overestimated and the costs underestimated. Many times the World Bank and the IMF are contributing to corruption because regulations are not put in place to control privatization. Due to the lack of regulations, corruption is allowed to flourish without anyone doing anything about it.
Other examples of Western corruption are liberalization that is not carefully managed, private banking and offshore banks that hide Third World assets, and decentralization that fails to “provide adequate resources and training to local governments.” It is easy to see from these examples that the greatest corruption in the world is taking place in the North. The $80 billion a year Western companies pay in leftovers is far worse than what the average police officer accepts in Russia or another country stereotyped as corrupt. Hugh Baykey called bribery “a direct transfer of money from the poor to the rich.” Ordinary people in developing countries who participate in corruption sometimes have to in order to survive. Your country is impoverished to the point that your wages are not enough to live on. One of the causes of this poverty is corruption in the West.
After these examples given by Hawley, I see that the North’s excuse of not forgiving the debt of poor countries due to corruption does not hold up. The corruption that is occurring in your own country is on a much larger scale than the corruption in developing countries. The biggest problem is that people don’t understand what true corruption looks like, so they are vulnerable to the delusion I was in just before reading this article.