Corruption and the Church

Martin Allaby

• Publisher: Regnum
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781912343706
• eBook ISBN: 9781912343799
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

How do Christians in the global south see the relationship between the church and corruption? This book summarises the views of 101 leaders of churches, Christian faith-based organisations and anti-corruption organisations, as told during in-depth interviews with the author. Capturing voices from across three continents, this summary and analysis of their views makes for some uncomfortable reading, but suggests some constructive ways forward.

2. Corruption: Its Causes and Remedies

The World Bank regards corruption as among the greatest obstacles to economic and social development in the world today. It undermines development by distorting the rule of law and weakening the institutional foundation on which economic growth depends. Attacking corruption is critical to the achievement of the World Bank’s overarching mission of poverty reduction.

The harmful effects of corruption are most severe on the poor. They are the ones who are hardest hit by economic decline, are most reliant on the provision of public services, and are least capable of paying the extra costs associated with bribery, fraud and the misappropriation of economic privileges. Furthermore, corruption sabotages policies and programmes that aim to reduce poverty.

In 2015, David Cameron, then British Prime Minister, spoke on corruption at the G7 summit, an informal bloc of seven industrialised democracies that meet annually:

Corruption is the cancer at the heart of so many of the problems we face around the world today. The migrants drowning in the Mediterranean are fleeing from corrupt African states.

Our efforts to address global poverty are too often undermined by corrupt governments preventing people getting the revenues and benefits of growth that are rightfully theirs.

Corruption undermines the wider global economy. The World Economic Forum estimates that corruption adds 10% to business costs globally, while the World Bank believes some $1trillion is paid in bribes every year.

Cutting corruption by just 10% could benefit the global economy by $380 billion every year, and the EU economy €120 billion every year.

Corruption threatens our prosperity and undermines our security. Whether it is the abduction of schoolgirls in Nigeria or the recruitment of fighters to the Taliban and Islamic State, ordinary people are drawn to extremist groups partly as a reaction to the oppression and corruption of their own governments. World leaders simply cannot dodge this issue any longer.

Causes of Corruption

Before reviewing potential approaches to fighting corruption, it is important to consider why corruption is so prevalent.

Douglass North was an American economist known for his work in economic history and co-recipient of the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He and his colleagues offer a ‘framework for interpreting recorded human history’ that proposes some answers to this question. He speaks about Open Access Orders and Limited Access Orders.

An Open Access Order is defined as a country where access to economic, political and social organisations, including the freedom to form them, is open to all individuals who qualify as citizens in the society and where citizens comprise most of the population.

North and colleagues observed the fact that ‘the upper-income, advanced industrial countries of the world today all have market economies with open competition, and multi-party democratic political systems. They have secure governments and require political officials to observe constitutional rules, which include political control and restraint over all organisations with the potential for major violence’.

They argue that these societies have an equilibrium that is fundamentally different from that of all middle and low-income developing countries today, which are defined as Limited Access Orders.

In Limited Access Orders, political élites divide up control of the economy, each getting some share of the rents or spoils. Since outbreaks of violence reduce the rents, élite factions have incentives to be peaceable most of the time.

Limited Access Orders have been the default option for human societies over the last ten thousand years up to 1800. Many would argue that this is the natural form of human society. They are not failed states, they are often not produced by evil men with evil intentions, and they are not the result of pathologies in the structure of these societies.

However, others would struggle to agree with North and colleagues that there is nothing evil or pathological about them, and if any ‘policy medicine’ exists, they would be keen to find it.

What Has Helped Some Countries to Reduce Corruption?

Robert Neild, Emeritus Professor of economics at the University of Cambridge since 1984, observed that the institutions required to keep corruption in check are well known. These include a well-paid military, police and civil services selected by merit; an independent judiciary; laws and regulations that inhibit corruption, good audit systems and a free press. But he goes on to ask the key question: ‘What gives rulers the will and the ability to introduce these institutions which, by their very nature, constrain the degree to which they, the rulers, can pursue power and wealth?’

Perhaps because the development literature did not regard corruption as a serious problem until the 1990s, systematic attempts to answer this question are quite recent. Daniel Treisman, Professor of political science at the University of California in Los Angeles, found six factors statistically related to various indexes of corruption. The following six factors were associated with less corruption: countries with Protestant traditions; a history of British rule; more developed economies; those with high exposure to imports; those with a long history of democracy; and unitary states had less corruption than federal states characterised by a union of partially self-governing provinces.

Together, these variables can account for more than 89% of the variation in each of the Transparency International Corruption Perception Index (CPI). This is an annual ranking of countries by their perceived levels of corruption, as determined by expert assessments and opinion surveys, in which corruption is defined as ‘the abuse of entrusted power for private gain’.

A major limitation of Treisman’s analysis is that a country’s level of economic development is far more powerful than any of the other variables, accounting for 73% of the variation in corruption in his model. This means that the answer to the question: ‘What is the most effective way of reducing corruption?’ could be answered by asking ‘What is the most effective way of increasing a country’s level of economic development?’ But his analysis does offer some clues about which other variables may influence corruption as well.

Colonial history was the next most significant variable in predicting current levels of corruption: a British heritage reduces corruption by ten to twenty points on the 100-point CPI scale.

There was no clear evidence that countries that have never been colonised are less corrupt today. Britain and her former colonies have a substantial advantage, which countries colonised by Portugal, France, or Spain do not share.

Treisman examined two, mutually compatible, explanations for this finding.

First, this might reflect the fact that most former British colonies inherited a common law tradition from the British. In common law systems, the law is made by judges on the basis of precedent, rather than on the basis of codes drawn up by scholars and promulgated by central governments.

Secondly, colonial heritage might influence a country’s degree of corruption not just via the type of legal system – based on judicial precedent or on codes – but also via the traditional ways in which justice had come to be administered. In former British colonies, the British left behind not just a particular accumulation of precedents and case law but also a particular ‘legal culture’.

He concluded that there was slightly stronger evidence for the ‘legal culture’ than the ‘common law’ explanation for the corruption-reducing legacy of British rule. He describes the British ‘legal culture’ as ‘an almost obsessive focus on the procedural aspects of law’, and adds the following quote from Harry Eckstein, Professor of political science at the University of California: ‘The British … behave like ideologists in regard to rules and like pragmatists in regard to policies. Procedures, to them, are not merely procedures, but sacred rituals.’ This willingness of judges to follow procedures, even when the results threaten hierarchy, clearly increases the chance that official corruption will be exposed.

As far as democracy goes, the effect seems to be very small. The highest estimate of the impact of 45 years of uninterrupted democracy was that it would reduce the corruption score by about 15 points on a 100-point scale. The apparent effect of state structure was even smaller: a federal state put the corruption index up by five to ten points on the 100-point scale.

Again, the effect of low imports also has a surprisingly small effect: an increase in the share of imports in GNP from 0 to 10% would yield somewhere from a one- or two-point decrease in the corruption score on a 100-point scale.

Douglass North and his colleagues offer an interesting explanation for the novel appearance since 1800 of a number of rich, democratic and relatively uncorrupt countries. In their analysis, combating corruption requires a society to change from being a Limited Access Order to an Open Access Order. Two crucial components of the transition are that it is not the result of any intention of the ruling élite, and the necessary institutional changes persist only when they are compatible with the incentives and constraints of those in power.

They note that such transitions do not occur frequently in history, but when they do they occur, it is in a period of time that is quite short by historical standards – ‘something of the order of fifty years or less’.

Michael Johnston, Professor of political science at Colgate University, offers a similar account of the ways in which corruption came to be reduced in societies which now enjoy relatively low levels of corruption:

Historically, many societies reduced corruption in the course of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Content
• List
• Introduction
• Corruption: Its Causes and Remedies
• Designing the Country Case Studies
• The Philippines
• Kenya
• Zambia
• Peru
• Comparisons across the Four Countries
• Conclusions
• Further Reading
• Back