Tet wish for Vietnam: shed the corruption skin in the Year of the Snake!
Cũng có ở Tiếng Việt
A version of this blog was published on Thanh Nien Newspaper on February 1, 2013
bribes
An Insider's View: What's on the Agenda at the International Corruption Hunters Alliance?
International Corruption Hunters Alliance 2012 Armed with Technology, Settlements and Collective Action
New Year’s resolution: Shine a light to reduce corruption in Vietnam
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| This traditional Vietnamese print depicts corruption in the form of rats bribing a cat in order to celebrate a wedding. |
Cũng có ở Tiếng việt
As Vietnam sits on the cusp of becoming a middle income country, reflections on achievements and emerging challenges is inevitable. Like a runner with tremendous stamina, Vietnam has made great strides in reducing poverty and in maintaining economic growth even through a global downturn. At the same time, we know that Vietnam continues to face formidable challenges, among them corruption.
Weekly Wire: the Global Forum
These are some of the views and reports relevant to our readers that caught our attention this week.
One
Aid and Beyond: Transparency, Accountability and Results
"As negotiations heat up ahead of the Fourth High Level Forum on aid effectiveness (HLF-IV), many countries are keen to move beyond a narrow aid effectiveness agenda, bringing in a broader range of actors and issues in recognition of the changing development landscape. Emerging economies such as China, India and Brazil are becoming ever more important. The demand for Africa’s oil and mineral resources is growing, providing many African countries with new revenue streams. Traditional donors’ aid budgets are under pressure. And people are taking to the streets and the twitter-verse to demand more transparent and accountable governance, from north Africa to north America and beyond. However, broadening the conversation to include more actors and issues beyond aid, must not and need not be at the expense of clear, measurable and time-bound commitments on aid effectiveness." READ MORE
Balancing individual and corporate accountability for corruption
Recently, many in the community concerned about international corruption have begun to discuss the need to hold individuals responsible criminally for their actions. While people have long discussed the failure to hold high-profile bribe recipients responsible, now the discussion has mutated to the bribe payer side. Lower-level targets are certainly more easily prosecuted than the rich and powerful. After all, corruption, like most crimes, is committed by people, not by companies, machines or cultures. Some countries, most notable the U.S., have brought an increasing number of cases against individuals directly involved in paying or authorizing bribes.
Monitoring for results: an accessory or ingredient on reform agendas?!
We have received a few comments to the blog we posted last week and we want to take this opportunity to thank our contributors. The examples provided and issues raised highlight both the on-going efforts that are happening at the country level and the need to learn from these efforts. The on-going discussion also raises some additional questions:
If money is the root of evil, are developed countries doing enough about the problem of bribes paid in the developing world?
It is a fact that many of the countries which suffer the most from corruption are the countries which have the fewest resources to combat the problem. Poor countries may be faced with a dilemma of using resources to prosecute the corruption which degrades the quality and quantity of public goods that reach their citizens, or using resources to provide those basic goods, such as food aid and roads.
At the same time, larger bribes are not infrequently paid by outsiders, such as foreign corporations. Casual observation shows that funds must be coming from outside some of the poorest countries. In short, the bribe money is flowing from the developed world into the developing world.
Stepping up prosecution of transnational bribery
The OECD Antibribery Convention requires parties to make promising, offering, or giving a bribe to an official of another government a crime. Although 38 countries have ratified the convention, Transparency International reports that as of the end of 2009 only seven are actively enforcing this provision. Another nine are making some effort to enforce it and have taken few if any steps to enforce the convention.
How can we compensate the victims of bribery?
In early 2009, the U.S.-based multinational Halliburton paid $579 million to the U.S. government to settle charges it had bribed Nigerian officials to win a contract. In late 2008 the German telecommunications giant Siemens paid $1.6 billion in fines, penalties and disgorgement of profits to the German and American governments for bribing officials.
Corruption and Finance: Are Innovative Firms Victims or Perpetrators?
Designing policies that promote innovation and growth is key to development. In many countries there is also considerable corruption, with government officials seeking bribes and many firms underreporting their revenues to the state to evade taxes. Might there be a set of reforms that allow policymakers to kill two birds with one stone, both reducing corruption and boosting innovation? New research suggests financial sector reform may be able to play this role.
In a recent paper with co-authors Meghana Ayyagari and Vojislav Maksimovic, we look at corruption—defined as both bribery of government officials and tax evasion—and how this is associated with firm innovation and financial development. Using firm-level data for over 25,000 firms in 57 countries, we investigate whether firms are victims, who pay more in bribes than they gain by underreporting revenues to tax authorities, or perpetrators, who gain more by avoiding taxes than they lose in paying bribes.
Of particular interest is the effect of corruption and tax evasion on innovative firms. Specifically, we explore the following questions:
How do you measure corruption?
A coworker recently emailed me an article about corruption in Vietnam. Both that article, which talks about the arrests of several journalists who had done extensive reporting on corruption, and some others I’ve read about anti