Back to the corrupt economy

Years ago, I published a relatively lengthy article on corruption, corrupt economics, and the accounts of economic corrupters. Given the current anti-corruption fever, I found it appropriate to republish it. Political Economy of Corruption: The problem of corruption is one of the biggest problems facing development and progress in various countries around the world.

Methods of confronting this criminal phenomenon vary between countries in terms of nature and severity. Hardly any country in the world is free of a certain type of corruption, and countries likewise vary in the degree to which corruption has spread through the body of the state. Naturally, the subject of corruption, according to my readings on the matter, contains many points worthy of mention, but the context cannot bear much elaboration and lengthy explanation, so I will be selective in presenting some points that I believed deserved attention. Preaching and directive methods in fighting corruption: Dealing with corruption is sometimes based on preaching and appealing to the corrupt to cease their corruption out of mercy for their countries and their poor citizens, reminding them of punishment in the afterlife or of moral and social values. They forget that the corrupt are criminals without consciences, and that in many cases these are members of organizations that employ every method to protect their interests. Modern history has not proven that any state succeeded in fighting corruption through these methods. Scientific and analytical methods in fighting corruption: In the early 1990s, I found in the library of the Iraqi Ministry of Planning a book by Professor Rose-Ackerman entitled "Corruption: A Study in Political Economy" (in English): Corruption: a study in political economy (By Rose-Ackerman). The book discussed various manifestations of corruption, perhaps the most important and most relevant to Iraq's current conditions being those chapters that discuss corruption in political economy* (an explanation of its meaning will come in a footnote to this article) and the functional spread of bribery. (The spread of corruption becomes functional when it establishes for itself special activities, goals, and tasks all linked to the manner in which corruption operations are carried out in a largely institutionalized activity.) It also discusses the fundamental relationship between voters, legislators, and interest groups, in addition to the role of government bureaucracy in shaping legislative choices. There is also corruption in the private sector, but the task of fighting it falls primarily on business owners, through activating corporate governance, in addition to the support provided by public legislation that punishes and deters the corrupt even in the private sector. Corruption as an economic activity: As mentioned above, a clear distinction must be made between corruption as an economic behavior and moral and religious deterrents, and it must be dealt with as an economic behavior whose practitioners consider profit and loss calculations just as in any other project. In other words, treating it should not be through preaching and guidance (although that may be useful at times), but rather by making the undertaking of corruption an unprofitable process that inflicts heavy loss on whoever commits it. To clarify the nature of corruption from a purely economic perspective:

The reason is that a reasonable person who gambles and loses his wages in one session must have expected a profit (pleasure) worthy of losing his wages for it and so he has not lost but achieved and satisfied his desire. The same logic above is applied by researchers on the subject of corruption to corrupts and their decisions to pursue a corruption or participation process and to study the potential outcomes of that process directly. The corrupt person must have expected a profit (pleasure) worthy of losing his wages for it and thus he has not lost and satisfied his desire. The same logic is applied by researchers on the subject of corruption to corrupts and their decisions to pursue a corruption or participation process and to study the potential outcomes of that process directly.

The level of salaries of government employees must be present when determining the penalties and fines of corrupt people because simple prison terms and dismissal may not deter corrupt people because their salaries are modest and the returns of corruption compensate them for years of work. Some developed countries are dominated by a serious type of corruption, namely relations between interest groups and corporations and between lawmakers who issue or impede the issuance of legislation consistent with the interests of those groups to meet their interests. There is a link between corruption and the structure of state institutions and the nature of the relationship between them and the nature of the various powers, mandates and decision-making mechanisms.

They were also objecting to considering corruption an economic practice governed by rules that can be curbed by employing those rules. They believe that classifying it as an economic practice amounts to praising or legitimizing it, even though it is precisely that, whether we like it or not. Some also believe that the religious approach is the best in terms of its deterrent effect, although many people pay no heed to religious preaching and may be atheists or followers of different faiths. So which law would be used to deter and frighten them? Naturally, civil law is the one capable of that, because it possesses deterrent power, whereas religion involves no coercion but rather preaching. It is not easy to convince these people of the concept of abstraction in scientific research and of separating influences from one another hypothetically so that they may be dealt with properly and realistically. The backward reductionist mind refuses to accept the existence of economics, political science, jurisprudence and sharia, and law and legislation, and instead desires to address these grave issues with a comprehensive rhetorical discourse that has no practical value. Antonio de Montchrétien is considered the first to coin the term "political economy" in 1615, when he produced his book titled: A Treatise on Political Economy. Others believe that the term "political economy" was used earlier by Louis de Mayerne in 1611, when he was discussing the relationship between economics and the state. He also used the term while examining the duties of the sovereign authority toward the citizens of the state. Taxes were the central issue that these thinkers sought to regulate the foundations of determining, imposing, and collecting them, and to demonstrate the dangers of misusing them as a sovereign right of the state over its subjects. From here comes the relationship between economics and politics, for politics derives from the Greek word (polis), which means city, and it became a symbolic reference to the state or governance, especially since ancient Greece was governed by a number of what are called (city-states).