Corruption is a dark legacy Bangladesh must tackle

Today is International Anti-Corruption Day.

Corruption, an infamous and recognized evil, remains a major challenge to socio-economic development in Bangladesh. From the hollowness of champion's title in corruption in the early 2000s, our progress in anti-corruption is still mediocre, despite the pompous claims by policy makers. Bribery in different government sectors is equivalent to more than one tenth of our national budget and around 2.4% of GDP, which is more than our expenditure in the education and health sectors. International Anti Corruption Day on 9 December reminds us of our pledge against corruption in the coming New Year. This article provides a brief description of corruption, its magnitude and scope in Bangladesh and, finally, concludes with recommendations for a successful anti-corruption movement.

The Bengali translation of corruption is durniti, which literally means ill practice. The popular definition of corruption is 'the use of public power for personal gain'. However, corruption can and does exist equally in the private sector in the form of syndicates, bribery and nepotism, etc. The literature on corruption provides a range of typologies depending on the size and nature of corruption, e.g. petty and grand corruption (Stapenhurst and Langseth), decentralized and centralized corruption (William Easterly) and predictable and unpredictable corruption (Akbar Ali Khan). When corruption involves major officials and large sums of money, it is grand corruption. And then there is petty corruption.

Under decentralized corruption, there are many bribe takers with no coordination, while under centralized corruption, a government leader organizes all corruption activities and distributes corrupt proceeds to each official. According to Easterly, decentralized corruption creates worse incentives for growth and is more damaging than centralized corruption. Similarly, corruption is predictable when the one who gives bribes knows that his act of bribery will pay off in attaining the objective. Corruption is unpredictable when a completion of the work is uncertain even after a payment of bribes. Generally corruption is predictable in an autocracy or an overly centralized government than in a decentralized one.

The act of corruption is not a recent phenomenon in human history. From Aristotle's Greece in 300 BC to Mobutu Sese Seko's Zaire in the 20th century, corruption has been evident across time and place. In South Asia also, evidence of corruption dates back thousands of years. In his book, Akbar Ali Khan has mentioned contemporaneous examples of corruption that existed 2,000 years ago, as noted in the writings of Manu and Kautilya. It was so widespread that Kautilya remarked, "…it is impossible for one dealing with government funds not to taste at least a little bit of the King's wealth". Similarly in Bengal, traces of unpredictable corruption are noted in 16th century poems and folksongs.

However, historical evidences show no antagonism between corruption and political and economic development. Even some policy makers considered corruption to be favorable for economic expansion. For instance, Samuel Huntington (1968) preferred bribe-taking bureaucrats to honest bureaucrats in an overly centralized bureaucracy (to overcome the problem of red tape). As a result, corruption or 'a growth killing incentive', as William Easterly calls it, did not attract much of attention from development economists up until the 1990s. In 1995, Roper Starch Worldwide conducted a poll among citizens of 19 developing countries, where it was found that corruption was ranked fourth among 15 national concerns of the citizens — after crime, inflation and recession. The most common drawbacks of corruption pointed out in recent studies include —

(a) macro-economic instability;
(b) environmental degradation;
(c) socio-economic inequality and
(d) discouragement for foreign investment.

Besides, corruption is not only inversely related to growth, but also associated with large budget deficits. The average budget deficit for the most corrupt countries is 6.7 percent of GDP (Easterly, 2002). Hence corruption became a hot topic in the development arena in the early 1990s and the World Bank, Transparency International (TI) and PRS groups came up with different measures to access levels of corruption, but mostly based on perceptions.

In a survey of the Credit Risk Guide in 1990, Bangladesh scored 1 (out of 6) on the quality of bureaucracy and 0 on corruption. Referring to this, William Easterly sarcastically stated, "in Dhaka, you can wait for a cold front in hell to get your business permit, or you can pay a bribe". Since then, however, Bangladesh has made great strides, especially in the field of education and gender parity, to become a role model for other developing nations. Nevertheless, the ghost of corruption has kept haunting the very fabric of the country's socio-economic development. Between 2001 and 2005, Bangladesh was a champion in corruption for five successive years in the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) of Transparency International. A recent report shows that Bangladesh ranks 139th among 168 countries.

A similarly disappointing picture is noticeable in the Worldwide Governance Indicator (WGI) 2015 of the World Bank. In WGI, the Control of Corruption is one of the six indicators of governance and Bangladesh scored only 18 out of 100, which is lower than the scores in India (44), Pakistan (24), South Asia (38) and even Sub-Saharan Africa (31). In other indicators of WGI, e.g. Rule of Law, Regulatory Quality and Government Effectiveness, Bangladesh falls behind through scoring the lowest of standards (in terms of South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa), which is far removed from the scores of OECD countries (whose average score is above 80 in all the six indicators).