UN Deadbeats Reflect Their Home Cultures

The Development Dilemma

Can parking tickets explain why poor countries are poor?

By Tim Harford

Being a review of Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence, and the Poverty of Nations, by Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 240 pages, $24.95

Many economists think corruption is a rational response to irrational incentives. The World Bank’s “Doing Business” database lists 40 countries, from Iraq to Ethiopia, in which legally acquiring the necessary permissions to export a single standard cargo container takes more than one month. The more difficult it is to do something legally, the larger the temptation to do it illegally. Small wonder that in developing countries, few people make more money than customs officials.

If perverse incentives create corruption, that suggests a simple solution to an age-old problem. Hence for the last decade or so the mantra of aid agencies has been “institutions matter” — even if it is not clear what humanitarians are supposed to do with this insight.

There is a popular alternative view that says corrupt countries are corrupt not because the incentives are perverse but because they’re stuffed full of crooks, born and bred. In this view, corruption is cultural, and poor countries are poor because their citizens are dishonest (or lazy, or fools).
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Ну да, я Рамбама уважаю, а он - РиФа

Вы родились в… Марокко

Вы были веселым негром, с которым никогда не скучно друзьям. А жизнь ваша была ярче африканского солнца. Вы и в нынешней жизни остались душой компании и готовы прийти на помощь всем вокруг.

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