*Topicality/Definitions Democracy Promotion Includes Military Intervention
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- ANTI-CORRUPTION PROGRAMS GROUNDED IN NEO-LIBERAL ASSUMPTIONS AND GOALS
- ANTI-CORRUPTION CAMPAIGNS OFTEN INCLUDE PRIVATIZATION AND DEREGULATION SCHEMES
- INTERNATIONAL ANTI-CORRUPTION EFFORTS FOCUS SOLELY ON PUBLIC OFFICIALS AND ECONOMIC CONCERNS
- FOCUS ON CORRUPTION AS AN ECONOMIC ACTIVITY TOO NARROW
- THE WORLD BANK USES “POOR GOVERNANCE” IN AFRICA AS AN EXCUSE FOR WHY STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT PROGRAMS FAILED – WITHOUT EXAMINING ITS OWN ROLE IN THE FAILURE
- ANTI-CORRUPTION CONDITIONALITY COUNTERPRODUCTIVE – EXACERBATES THE CONTRIBUTION OF WORLD BANK POLICIES TO UNDERDEVELOPMENT
Links: Anti-Corruption EffortsANTI-CORRUPTION POLICIES MASK THE IMPOSITION OF COUNTERPRODUCTIVE NEO-LIBERAL AGENDAS Masaya Kobayashi, Politics Professor Chiba University, 2006, Comparing Political Corruption and Clientelism, ed. Junichi Kawata, p. 8 Because neo-liberalism criticized the inefficiency of “big government,” it used political corruption as a means to assail governments. But, privatization and deregulation themselves have been causing the problems of corruption as the result of the neo-liberal reform. In recent years, studies on political corruption have determined that we should not try to decimate our state but, rather, reform it. These recent studies analyze “anti-corruption strategies.” An anti-corruption strategy can be through of in two ways: one is the holistic approach. This would reveal structural and systematic problems in politics and economics, including political corruption, and work towards a plan for comprehensive reform. But, we cannot yet know whether or not this type of strategy will succeed. The other strategy is more limited. It is a strategy that is meant to be formulated according to the characteristics of corruption. For example, it is important to improve the judicial system against the crimes. It should also enlighten society by offering information, open such information to the public and, by doing so, expose political corruption. ANTI-CORRUPTION PROGRAMS GROUNDED IN NEO-LIBERAL ASSUMPTIONS AND GOALS Alan Doig & Stephen Riley, Business School-University of Teesside & Social Science Professor Staffordshire University (UK), 1998, Corruption and Anti-Corruption Strategies: Issues and Case Studies from Developing Countries, in Corruption: Integrity Improvement Initiatives in Developing Countries, [http://magnet.undp.org/Docs/efa/corruption/Chapter03.pdf] The new international policy agenda of the late 1990s thus involves a number of assumptions about corruption and the effective means to reduce it. Corruption is most obviously defined as public office, public sector or institutional corruption. The discussion of the reform of corruption is almost always conducted in the context of a “governance” framework and involves optimistic expectations of both economic and political liberalization. It is also assumed that public sector corruption will be reduced if the size of the state is reduced. Corruption will also be minimized through general economic liberalization and through political liberalization, that is, moves toward liberal, pluralist politics, involving a freer press, competitive party politics, and the revival or creation of other independent institutions , reducing corruption by making it more vulnerable to exposure. In this way, corruption will have potentially damaging political consequences. ANTI-CORRUPTION CAMPAIGNS OFTEN INCLUDE PRIVATIZATION AND DEREGULATION SCHEMES Robin Theobald, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Polytechnic of Central London, 1990, Corruption, Development and Underdevelopment, p. 156-7 Privatization involves reducing the size of the public sector by selling off nationalized industries. Since the enthusiasm for privatization derives from a firm belief in the virtues of unrestricted competition, it is invariably associated with deregulation; that is to say, the removal of ‘artificial’ impediments to the free play of market forces. The impetus behind the privatization drive initially has nothing to do with the problem of corruption but reflected an upsurge in the 1970s in the population of laissez-faire economics and a growing conviction among certain economists and politicians that it offered the only means of regenerating the stagnant capitalist economies of the developed world. Privatization and deregulation, coupled with a tight monetary policy to combat inflation, became the economic orthodoxy of the 1980s, especially in Britain and the USA as well as in the latter’s client states, such as Chile and South Korea. The economic predominance of the USA ensured that laissez-faire ideas were given a new lease of life in key international agencies such as the IMF and the World Bank, for whom the notions of privatization and deregulation seemed particularly relevant to the economic problems of many UDCs. By the 1980s the most urgent of these problems was chronic indebtedness and the serious balance of payments it had produced in counties of the third world. In return for re-scheduling agreements on increasingly unpayable loans more and more UDCs were constrained to implement structural adjustment programs involving drastic cuts in domestic consumption and investment. Given the heavy burden of an inflated and invariably inefficient public sector absorbing a huge proportion of government revenue, it was probably inevitable, given the new orthodoxy, that it became a prime target for retrenchment. Accordingly the late 1980s have witnessed the widespread adoption of privatization programs by formerly statist and in some cases unequivocally socialist governments throughout the third world (see Shackleton, 1986). Where organs of state, for various reasons, cannot be sold off, restructuring has or will entail stringent cutbacks (not least in staffing) and in some cases winding up altogether. Accompanying privatization, deregulation has involved dispensing with such controls as import licenses, tariffs, food or petroleum subsidies as well as the flotation of currencies. Notwithstanding the economic impetus to privatization of the World Bank has explicitly recognized a link between laissez-faire economics and the control of corruption. Whilst agreeing that corruption is undesirable and that steps should be taken to reduce it, the Bank has little confidence in anti-corruption drives. These tend to be short-lived and are largely ineffective because they concentrate on punitive measures and rely on the imposition of greater controls. Fewer controls in the form of deregulation is the best way of dealing with corruption since this reduces the opportunities for abuse. Corruption can be limited by striving to avoid administratively created scarcities of the kind which in centrally-planned economies have led to the emergence of a second economy. Abandoning attempts to regulate markets enables the state by cutting back on its activities to perform those it retains that much more effectively. The reduced demand for public servants should permit improved salaries and conditions for those who remain: “Corruption is usually better fought by a combination of fewer, better-paid officials controlling only what needs to be (and can effectively be) controlled in the full light of public scrutiny, than by occasional anticorruption ‘campaigns’” (World Development Report, 1983, p. 117). INTERNATIONAL ANTI-CORRUPTION EFFORTS FOCUS SOLELY ON PUBLIC OFFICIALS AND ECONOMIC CONCERNS Zoe Pearson, Doctoral Student, Australian National University, 2001, Corruption and anti-corruption, P. Larmour & N. Wolanin, eds., p. 42-3 However, the examination of anti-corruption efforts by states remains limited, and to some extent a “diplomacy in research” still exists. The current literature and action in the international domain approaches the causes, effects and solutions to corruption from largely an economic or political viewpoint. To some extent this reflects international practice in general, where consensus and action is more common and more readily arrived at in economic areas. In addition, much of the corruption literature and international action focuses on the actions of government officials only, and how to make these actors more accountable. For example, the OECD Convention focuses on combating bribery of foreign public officials in international business conventions;’ the four UNGA instruments concern adoption of an international code of conduct for public officials, and resolutions and a declaration concerning action and cooperation against corruption and bribery in international commercial transactions; and the World Bank’s mandate is restricted to the economic causes and effects of corruption. Focusing solely on the actions of public officials often obscures the underlying wider responsibility of states to provide an environment in which corruption is not tolerated or condoned. The role of the state therefore seems marginalized and the analysis restricted to economic concerns.
Barry Hindess, Political Science Professor, Australian National University, 2001, Corruption and anti-corruption, P. Larmour & N. Wolanin, eds., p. 3 For my purposes, however, what is most striking about these cases is that the word “corruption” is used to describe the police activities in question, in spite of the fact that economic gain is obviously not the central issue. Even in Washington, the home of the World Bank, there are times when it is clearly recognized that there is more to corruption than the pursuit of financial reward. Rose-Ackerman’s treatment of corruption as if it were first and foremost an issue of financial gain and economic effect may not deny the existence of these other forms of corruption but it does suggest that they should be seen as something of a sideline. Thus, one problem with the narrowly economistic understanding of corruption concerns the value judgments – for example, that a few thousand brutal slayings may be ultimately less important than economic growth – which its technical language tends to disguise.
Rita Abrahamsen, (lecturer on African and Postcolonial Politics at the University of Wales, PhD. In Development) 2000 Disciplining Democracy: Development Discourse and Good Governance in Africa, Pg. 40b – 41a By the late 1980s it was an inescapable fact that the miracle of the market had failed to materialize as predicted. More than a decade of adjustment had yet to produce a single definite success story on the African continent, and it is in this context of the perceived failure of the reigning development paradigm that we must analyze the emergence of the good governance agenda. The development community, and in particular the World bank, needed to explain why economic growth had not occurred in the manner so confidently predicted by its neo-liberal economists. The answer they came up with was ‘poor governance’. Political factors, the World Bank report Sub-Saharan Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Growth ,asserted, had prevented the implementation of the right economic policies and the ‘root cause of weak economic performance in the past’ was blamed on the ‘failure of public institutions’ (1989: xii). In other words, the reason for the failure of structural adjustment was not the programs themselves, not imbalances in the global political economy, unfair markets, or adverse domestic conditions, but African governments themselves. Drawing attention to the lack of accountability, transparency and predictability at the Bank concluded that a ‘crisis of governance’ was making it almost impossible for the right economic policies to work. Africa’s uncertain and unpredictable political environments were also sent o discourage private investors from risking their money, due to fear that their property would be unprotected and their profits consumed by corruption. Successful adjustment thus came to be seen as a result of appropriate institutions, political skill and personal commitment, as well of bureaucratic competence. ANTI-CORRUPTION CONDITIONALITY COUNTERPRODUCTIVE – EXACERBATES THE CONTRIBUTION OF WORLD BANK POLICIES TO UNDERDEVELOPMENT John Gledhill, Anthropology Professor, University of Manchester, 2004, Between Morality and the Law: corruption, anthropology, and comparative society, ed. I. Pardo, p. 157-8 The principal voice of dissent from a position that saw the interventions of the North in general, and the United States in particular, as constructive, was that of Jeffrey Sachs, of Harvard’s International Development Center. Sachs argued that corruption was symptomatic of underdevelopment, and underdevelopment was what the rest of the policies of agencies such as the IMF and World Bank were producing. Global anti-corruption drives were in danger of providing yet another lever for the broader missions of these agencies, encouraging mis-diagnosis of the real causes of growing impoverishment (Coatsworth et al. ibid., p. 25). Not only was “good governance” occupying too high a place on the global agenda in comparison with malaria, but Washington’s control over the world economy was undermining the very conditions under which good governance might thrive: “Paradoxically, just as our information technology and the spread of democracy allow civil society to play a role, civil society is as much crushed as it is helped by the heavy hand of Washington-based institutions in the way they intervene in these matters (Coatsworth et al, ibid, p. 26).” The contradictions in the “conditionality” model were, in Sach’s view, quite patent. On the one hand, it showed no sensitivity to the fragility of local economies, and on the other, it was selectively applied in accordance with the geopolitical interests of Washington, as illustrated by the striking lack of interest shown in the corruption surrounded the 1994 shares-for-loans deal with Yeltsin’s Russia. Providing a fraction of the natural resources stolen by Yeltsin’s associates was put into the war-chest for his re-election campaign, the fundamental interest of the US government, World Bank, IMF, and OECD was served (ibid.). Directory: assets assets -> Northern territory of australia assets -> Number: caveat in the [Will/Will and Codicil/Estate of] assets -> Invitation for Bid Calact/mbta for Standard Floor and Low Floor Rural Duty Vehicles ifb no. 12-03 November 14, 2012 assets -> 12 Step Retreats For Everyone in Twelve Step Recovery Ratner Fellowship assets -> 12 Step Retreats For Everyone in Twelve Step Recovery Ratner Fellowship assets -> Sigaccess annual Report assets -> Central Government is expected to ask the seventh pay commission to consider merging 50% dearness allowance assets -> List of accessible executive records assets -> Emergency telephone numbers Call toll-free from anywhere in France Download 2.51 Mb. Share with your friends:
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