International Anti-Corruption Day is coming up on December 9th, a day to raise public awareness of corruption. Fighting against corruption has been integrated into the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly of SDG 16. SDG 16, specifically target 16.5 aims to “Substantially reduce corruption and bribery in all their forms”. The term corruption refers to a form of dishonesty, or a criminal offense which is undertaken by a person or organization which is given the responsibility of a position of authority, where the person/ organization aims to gain unlawful benefits or abuse their power for personal gains. The main form of corruption we consider and hear about is bribery, but there are also other forms of corruption, including lobbying, embezzlement, misuse of official position and many more.
Impacts of corruption
Corruption is one of the many things that continues to undermine human development, principally because of the way it results in necessary diversion of public resources away from allocation to essential services. It also results in an increase in inequality, and obstructs local and national economic development, by skewing the markets of goods and services, corroding laws and reducing the public confidence in governments and official leaders. In terms of financial impacts, corruption costs an extortionate amount, over $1 billion are paid in bribes each year, and The World Economic Forum estimates that the global cost of corruption is at least $2.6 trillion, with some of the greatest impacts being on developing countries, where corruption, bribery, tax evasion and illicit financial flows cost $1.26 trillion per year for developing countries alone. On the scope of impacts on people, corruption hurts everyone. The impacts of corruption extend beyond the individuals carrying out the act, but the victims who are implicated.
Organizational impacts of corruption
Financial loss
Damage to employee morale
Damage to the organization’s reputation
Resources and organizational focus are diverted away from necessary sectors, including the delivery of services to the community
Increased levels of scrutiny, oversight and regulation may be imposed
Individual impacts of corruption
Termination of employment
Criminal charges
May impact up on relationships with friends, family and colleagues
Will hinder future possibilities, particularly in the aspect of work
On a wider scale, research has shown that corruption increases inequality between people, particularly between communities of people, decreases popular accountability and political responsiveness, which in severe cases will lead to frustrated citizens accepting intolerant tactics, which often shift the blame of issues onto minority groups in the place of economic and political elites.
Corruption on a global scale
There are many ways to look at corruption on a global scale just as with any other measure of human development. To measure corruption, the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) is often used, an index which ranks countries based upon their “perceived levels of public sector corruption, as determined by expert assessments and opinion surveys.” The most recent edition of the CPI was published in January 2021 regarding the data for 2020, where 180 countries have been ranked on a scale of 100 to 0, where 100 indicates “very clean”, and 0 indicates “highly corrupt”. Visible on the map below, there are a high number of corruption countries, with very few rankings in the highest category. The two highest ranking countries are New Zealand and Denmark, scoring 88 out of 100, which is unfortunately a decrease in comparison to other years, where both have scored 91 in recent years, which makes us question the progress occurring towards completion of this target of SDG 16.
Example of corruption – Shell in Nigeria
Corruption generally affects those that are already suffering in other ways, whether this be financial hardship or through other means of being disadvantaged. In Nigeria, a bribery case involving the oil and gas company Shell deprived Nigerian people of over $1.1 billion, as the money was diverted to corrupt officials instead of the national budget, which is extremely devastating for an oil-rich country like Nigeria, where according to the World Bank, over 50% of the population live in extreme poverty.
What is being done against corruption – work of organizations
The UN Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC) is the first legally binding instrument that is fighting against corruption. The convention has three main goals:
1. To promote and strengthen measures to prevent and combat corruption more efficiently and effectively
2. To promote, facilitate and support international co-operation and technical assistance in the prevent of and fight against corruption
3. To promote integrity, accountability and proper management of public affairs and public property
The publication sets out a series of preventive measures that are aimed at hindering corruption in both the public and private sectors. These measures include a variety of articles, that all countries must abide by and work towards, some of which are listed below:
Establish an independent anti-corruption body
Enhance transparency, efficiency and use objective criteria in the recruitment, hiring, retention, promotion and retirement of public officials
Enhance transparency in the funding of electoral campaigns and political parties
Establish measures and systems aimed at facilitating the reporting of corruption by public officials to appropriate authorities
Promote access to information concerning the work of the public administration, and enhance transparency through public reporting
Enhance ethics, integrity, and transparency in the private sector through the adoption of accounting and auditing standards and the establishment of penalties at civil, administrative and criminal levels
Establish regulatory and supervisory regimes aimed at preventing money-laundering
Additionally, the Convention highly recommends that countries criminalizes many corruption related offences, including:
Bribery of national public officials
Bribery of foreign public officials and officials of international organisations
Abuse of functions
Illicit enrichment
Bribery in the private sector
Embezzlement of property in the private sector
Money laundering
Concealment
Obstruction of justice
What is being done against corruption – SDG 16
There are two main indicators for the progress of target 16.5:
1. Proportion of persons who had at least one contact with a public official and who paid a bribe to a public official, or were asked for a bribe by those public officials, during the previous 12 months
2. Proportion of businesses that had at least one contact with a public official and that paid a bribe to a public official, or were asked for a bribe by those public officials during the previous 12 months
These indicators may be criticized for only focusing on bribery, which is a crucial aspect of corruption, but is not representative of the full picture, and does not consider many of the other aspects which should be considered when talking about corruption.
Comments