Category Archives for Corruption

Corruption and the Government

Have you ever asked yourself what exactly makes a corrupt country? And how do we know which one is more corrupt than the other? Can we even compare them? The World Bank has designed a system that is in place to analyze the governance competency of the different countries of the world. There are six factors that are considered and one of them is corruption. That makes this political and economic phenomenon wary important to understand if we are to examine how effective a government is in what it has to do.

What is corruption?

post3aWe are all aware of the term, but do we know what exactly it means? Every country has a system of laws in place to protect their citizens in to give them an equal opportunity to succeed in life and their business endeavors. That is most of the countries in the world do this for their citizens.

Other nations of the world that are organized in this way often refuse to trade with countries that do not share their ideological views or ideas. Mainly because similar ideological views entail a similar way of acting in economic transactions and political collaborations.

Sometimes even though a county can declare to have a certain set of rules the ruling class in the said country do not abide by them. That is when we can start talking about a corrupt state, what it entails basically is that the political structure ignores the law and does whatever it seems to think to be the right thing to do. Also, people with the right means can pay the government officials to do certain things for them and to give them additional benefits in their endeavors.

Why Is it Bad?

post3bThe worst thing about corruption is in the fact that it allows some people to make a monopoly on production or trade in the state where corrupt officials function. That also means that public property can be misused and traded with in accordance with the needs of individuals and not the sate as a whole and all its citizens.

Besides those potential foreign investors cannot approach the market because they can easily be pushed out by the corrupt elite or their business can be undermined by the institutions of the state in place to protect from such things. Corruption is a more complex term for a sort of political and economic nepotism that can only help a small number of people in the long run.

The other issue that is at hand is the fact that corruption is most common in countries that are transitioning from one mode of governance to another, or in countries that have high levels of social distress or even war.

Whatever the reason high levels of corruption in any country do not represent a good state of affairs and countries that do display such symptoms are usually ignored by the international community because potential investors do not want to see their money go to wasted because of corrupt individuals in the government.