“Corruption and systemic inefficiency,” article by Fábio Medina Osório
Article of 12/07/2012 on corruption and systemic inefficiency, with reference to bodies such as Transparency International, the World Bank, and the IMF.
Translated from the original.
In the globalized world there is a growing concern in society about corruption. Hence there are international bodies devoted to measuring this pathology by means of criteria that depend on opinion makers, as is the case of Transparency International, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the United Nations (UN). It is a phenomenon so far very difficult to measure and the criteria adopted may even be questioned precisely by those who form opinion.
The paradox may occur, for example, that the media expose public scandals more intensely, giving the impression that they have increased, when in reality what may have increased is the intensity of the spotlight on non-republican practices. It may also occur that public exposure is closely related to a significant increase in dishonest practices in the public sector. There are not sufficient criteria for this scientific measurement, in the absence of an independent and autonomous agency for these statistics, which have not been a central focus of other institutions.
To measure the problem, there is a first difficulty: defining corruption conceptually and creating priorities and criteria to distinguish it from illegalities. For many international institutions, from a sociological perspective, the concept simply covers the use of public powers to achieve private ends. This kind of simplification carries the risk of mixing practices very different from one another, such as any kind of apparent undue favoritism in the public sector, abuse of power, misuse of purpose, violation of competence rules and even an enormous range of illegalities dealing with explicit or implicit conflicts of interest. That is, under this broad concept, it is possible to blend extremely distinct situations and produce insurmountable perplexities. This is apparently what has often been happening with the application of Law 8,429/92, which seeks to combat administrative improbity.
However, there is another phenomenon, which concerns developing countries much more closely, indirectly linked to practices of unlawful enrichment in the public sector, which perhaps deserves, increasingly, the intense attention of public authorities and of public opinion itself. It is known that this phenomenon, by itself, is a cause of immense harm to society and to the public coffers, perhaps much greater than that derived from the practices defined as corrupt. It concerns endemic or systemic inefficiency.
Institutionalized, systematized, endemic disorganization must be the object of attention by public and oversight bodies because it involves practices of deep waste of public resources. Moreover, it creates fertile environments for dishonest practices and lack of internal or external controls, absence of transparency and little effectiveness of containment and prevention mechanisms. There is no doubt that this is an extremely important agenda.
It cannot be accepted that any sector remain immune from rules of transparency and adequate internal and external controls. It is imperative to foster adequate levels of monitoring of results and deviations. The public sector cannot, evidently, constitute an agenda instrumentalized in favor of subordinate interests, but this perception must enter institutional structures. This does not mean being refractory to the private-sector agenda: on the contrary, the interests can and should be convergent, public, private, general, collective and diffuse interests, to the extent possible and weighable.
Consider the case of regulatory agencies. Their effectiveness, operability and performance depend, ultimately, on adequate budgets, independence of the authorities, autonomous terms long enough to ensure distance from political and economic power, a distance that does not mean isolation of the bureaucracy. The same can be said of a nation’s administrative courts: they depend on long terms, adequate criteria for choosing members and technical controls on appointments, in addition to a whole agenda of commitments to transparency and productivity. A country’s degree of development can be measured by the institutional structures in force.