5. REASONS FOR CORRUPTION
I would like to make a
few suggestion of my own for possible reasons for corruption all over the world and
mirror them with the conditions in Thailand.
- Low salaries of public servants
- Low education of people
- Big financial gaps between social classes
- Lacking transparency of governance
- Unstable political situation
- Lack of democracy
- Lack of freedom of word
- Heavy bureaucracy
- Centralized power
The above collection is of course in no way exhaustive but lists some reasons of high
importance. Let’s have a closer look at them:
Low salaries make it more attractive for the officials to take bribes. If they can not make
a sufficient living, they probably will not see it morally wrong of getting “their share” of
the cake. Higher salaries would at least raise the minimum level before someone would
be willing to take the risk and step over the edge. In Thailand the pay has usually been
small if paid at all, so it has been a part of culture to get paid from the clients. This makes
the decision making process totally opaque.
Low education of people leads to a situation where people do not have the needed
knowledge of taking a stand. They may not know what the officials are allowed to do or
are unable to take up measures to make a difference.
Big financial differences between social classes lead to many difficulties. Indirectly this
causes political instability and, for instance, in Thailand it is common to hear people
talking about “the parliament of the rich”. More directly these differences make7
corruption, like vote-buying, easy, because the poor could be willing to give away their
vote even for a fairly small amount of money. Of course, this would make large-scale
attempts of this kind much easier to realize.
Lacking transparency is more or less easy to understand. If it is impossible for the people
to view the processes that take place at the public offices, it lowers the risk of getting cut
of wrong-doing and makes it sometimes possible in the first place.
In an unstable political situation the one who has the ability to use force gains an
immense amount of power, in South-East Asia coups by army generals are frequent, like
we can see in today’s Myanmar (Burma). This has led to corruption too, meaning the
ones who pay will get protection, for example, of the local army troops against possible
looting or other dangers. Prof. Nualnoi Treerat says the big gap between the Thai urban
middle class and the poor rural people causes political instability, which in turn makes a
reform very difficult and hence keeps the patron and client –tradition alive /3/.
Lack of democracy would of course mean that rules do not have to be widely accepted
and can be unfair because of this. The undemocratic leaders are in the best possible
position of accepting bribes, because they do not have to care about laws or law
enforcement in particular.
Without freedom of word the media can not publish stories about the unjust going on in
the society and most of the people would not know about them in the first place. One
should not underestimate the power of news media nowadays. Of course the media could
be bribed too and be part of the corrupted network but it is more likely that governments
just regulate their output or shut them down completely. This is such an important issue
that I will get back to it in a later part of this document.
Heavy bureaucracy could mean very slow implementation of projects and lead to
corruption, in an attempt to accelerate things by bribing the officials involved. The role of
a government is often greater than needed, giving the officials more power. For these
assumptions I found hard evidence on considering the case of Thailand: table 1 shows
that 79 percent of firms say that they either “always”, “mostly” or “frequently” pay extra
money to the officials to get things done on time /4/. So it could be argued that the
officials force firms to pay higher rates to get the service in an acceptable schedule.