Petty corruption draining Asian growth
Updated
A major United Nations report says so-called "petty corruption" is draining economic growth across Asia, and perpetuating regional poverty. The UN Development Programme report was launched in Jakarta by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.
Presenter: Corinne Podger
Speaker: Anuradha Rajivan, United Nations Development Program spokesman
RAJIVAN: That's one of the big messages of the report, that corruption in daily life is no less important than the grand corruption of large contracts and actually the term petty corruption is a misnomer. Probably a better way to call it would be retail corruption, to give the impression of how widespread it can be, how persistent it can be and how it can affect daily lives of people.
PODGER: Is it possible to put a price tag on what kind of low level corruption is costing the region?
RAJIVAN: One of the supplementary findings of the report is that no single metric works, so the dollar amount while you can estimate, and there are dollar estimates, but they completely miss out on other dimensions of corruption, for example, the number of people that are affected. And when institutional breakdown happens. In cases like legal corruption, where it's perfectly legal, but perfectly corrupt, when non-state actors and big businesses adjust the laws of developing countries, multi-national corporations bacially writing or rewriting laws institutionally undermining institutions. There is no way you can put a dollar amount to it.
PODGER: And it is much more than income isn't it? The reports found it has implications for mortality rates, particularly child mortality and access to education?
RAJIVAN: Yes, child mortality, access to education and in fact through education you are not really transmitting poverty across generations, but you are also transmitting poverty of values across generations.
The real cost of corruption is not money after all, unless you pay for health services, the poor people who rely very heavily on public provisioning, they can't get access to health services. For example, in a maternity hospital or when a woman gets admitted, she sometimes even has to pay a bribe to find out the sex of her child once it is born and basically if there is a bandage, there are no drugs. These kind of problems happen. Big businesses and multinational corporations get drug testing standards relaxed which basically you sell sugar, salt, fake and counterfeit drugs which the poor unknowingly buy, leading to preventable deaths.
PODGER: And these are tragic human impacts of corruption. Your report also looks at some of the affects of it for destroying the regions natural resources?
RAJIVAN: Yes, natural resources are particularly prone to corruption, because there is a huge profit potential, natural resources like forests and the minerals are often located in remote areas. There are unclear and common property rights, especially for the poor and involve large businesses and multinational corporations. This results in a very potent area for corruption.
PODGER: We've seen a lot of coverage over the past months of corruption related to the global food crisis and to the theft of aid destined for victims of the Chinese earthquake and the Burmese cyclone. So if you are trying to tackle corruption on a level where it is harming people who have lost absolutely everything. that suggests long standing attitudes that will be difficult to shift. How does UNDP see that going forward?
RAJIVAN: Yes. This is where the importance of prevention, ethics, education and generally better utilising the education sector as a whole comes in. So we prevent and we try to change attitudes. That's also more efficient, because corruption is something that happens in secret, not so much in public domain. In public visability we are not going to get witnesses, and written proof and stuff is much harder to get, you have to infer. So rather than putting these cases through the court process, it might be much more efficient to invest in systems that minimise corruption and prevent it as well as ongoing supervision. And like you said in emergencies, when institutions break down there is a sudden influx of large sums of money and there's an urgency to spend fast and deliver results. So the standard operating procedures don't apply.
This is again a potent area for corruption which affects the worst off and human people in a very human conditions.
