FILSAFAT KORUPSI - Direktori File UPI

For those reasons, anti-corruption efforts gained a level support which they never had before. However, the
success of such efforts has been limited. 32).
My argument is that they have been inadequate because of their formalist approach to corruption, focused
on the adoption of anti-corruption laws with little regard to the
structural causes of corruption. Particularly in Latin America, such formalist approaches have
28). See Shleifer and Vishny, supra note 12.
29). See Susan Rose-Ackerman, CORRUPTION : A S TUDY IN POLITICAL ECONOMY 212 (Academic
Press, 1978).
30). See Paolo Mauro, Corruption and Growth, 110 Q UARTERLY J OURNAL OF ECONOMICS, 681,
686 (1995).
31). See Shang-Jin Wei, How Taxing is Corruption on International Investors, 82 T HE REVIEW OF
ECONOMICS AND STATISTICS 1, 8 (2000).
32). As an example of such formalization efforts, see reports regarding the 1997 OECD Convention on
Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Official on Transnational Business Transaction. See OECD Staff,
THE OECD ANTI –BRIBERY CONVENTION : DOES IT WORK ? (OECD, 2006) available at
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/43/8/34107314.pdf.
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proved incapable of reducing perception of corruption. 33). Most countries have anti-corruption
laws. However, selective enforcement of corruption laws, usually focused on opposing parties,
has done little to increase the legitimacy of political institutions. An alternative argument, which I believe
is particularly relevant in the case of Latin America, would be that perception of corruption is correlated
with economic inequality and that both are locked in a vicious circle in which economic inequality
increases corruption and corruption increases inequality. 34).
Other theories have already accounted for the obvious fact that
corruption has negative distributive consequences. Corruption by stealing diverts public
resources, reducing the capacity of government to invest, and corruption through bribery benefits
certain powerful groups, at the expense of the majority of the population.35).
However, another almost obvious conclusion is that inequality in the distribution of wealth also stimulates
corruption, once the wealthier will use their economic resources to protect their privileges.
Hence, the circle is extremely difficult to break if anti-corruption efforts are not also targeted at
distributing political and economic power. Other analyses following this path also identified a strong
correlation between perception of corruption and measures of income inequality based on the GINI Index.
One interesting approach was to control levels of protection of private property, considering it as a proxy
for institutionalization. It demonstrated that, in societies in which there is a strong protection of
33). At this point it is impossible to disentangle real corruption from perception of corruption. I argued that
perception of corruption has a disruptive effect independent of the existence or not of corruption. It is also
true that there is no better measure of reduction of real corruption than the reduction on the perception of
corruption. For the purpose of this paper, the fact that formalist approaches to corruption did not reduce
perception of corruption is a sufficient argument once I am mainly concerned with perception, not real
corruption.
34). See Appendix I to III. Correlating the Corruption Perception Index from Transparency International
for 1997 to 2003 with the GINI Index in the WIDER database also from 1997 to 2003 for 84 countries, I
found a strong negative correlation between both indexes (-.53) demonstrating that income inequality is a
good predictor of corruption perception. For similar results with different databases, see Edward Glaeser,
Jose Scheinkman, and Andrei Shleifer, The Injustice of Inequality, 50 Journal of Monetary Economics 199
(2003).
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private property, the effect of economic inequality in corruption is lower.36). In general, I would
argue that, in the long run, inequality stimulates corruption even in countries with well
established institutions. Corruption, or more properly, the perception of corruption, is firmly
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