Q&A with Jeffery Sachs on Corruption

An interview with Sachs at Transparency Intl;

TW: You have said that “we don’t need long studies from the World Bank for trying to perfect the imperfectible” and “we don’t need workshops on corruption”. What is your reasoning behind this?

JS: What I mean by that is that we don’t need them as preconditions for delivering help right now. We spend most of our time in places where we never get down to making a change. The World Bank will study the problem for two-to-three years before something gets started. On corruption, my view is not to have a general process of anti-corruption seminars, but rather have a process for scaling up the health sector, or improving management in the education sector or the transportation sector. Within that context the focus should be on transparency, bribery, corruption, delivery of services, monitoring and evaluation, and so on. Instead, I feel like countries are being put into black and white categories like 'corrupt' and 'clean'.

How do you clean up? Well, that’s going to be a long conceptual process of re-education. I don’t buy it, and I don’t find it very practical. We’ve got corruption scandals all through the rich world right now involving the poor countries, which is very disconcerting. We ought to be focusing on our own misbehaviour as well. So the main thing is we have lost a huge amount of time when we could be doing practical and deliverable things, and since I’m against the idea of an 'Axis of Evil', I’m also against categorising countries as good or bad.

TW: In that context, do you feel that the World Bank’s anti-corruption policy is an extension of American foreign policy?

JS: Well, I think that it’s a little bit naïve. I would not have done it as an anti-corruption policy. I would have done it as part of an agriculture policy, a health policy, or some other policy. By having announced it as an anti-corruption policy, the World Bank has spent a year on it, and I don’t see a direction on the actual implementation of anti-poverty programmes. So, what happens is what I had predicted. Everybody got into a fight, everyone has discussed theory, and concepts, and accusation and counter-accusations. In the meantime, real things that are urgently needed and absolutely possible, people are not getting done.

TW: Do you see a connection between democratisation or its failure, and corruption?

JS: It’s very complicated. Some democracies are highly corrupt. Sometimes democratisation opens the space for corruption, but authoritarian rule can also be hugely corrupt. I’m not sure I would say those kinds of systems per se determine corruption levels. I do believe that democracy can control corruption better than authoritarian rule because there is more space for the involvement of civil society, which is absolutely critical to controlling corruption. In the Russian case, the Soviet system was incredibly corrupt, but it was a little harder to steal assets. In the post-Communist/post-Soviet system there was a lot of corruption, and you could more easily steal assets. So they changed the nature of this a bit, but neither of these are intrinsically related to democracy.