Bureaucracy is in our bones. Prehistoric evidence unearthed at archeological digs suggests that the rudiments of a bureaucratic social order in place 19000 years ago. Bureaucratic governance predates,by many millennia,homo sapiens earliest experiments with democracy.
Do we need government.
Not everyone agrees that government and bureaucracy are basic to society. Some argue in a distorted extension of Thomas jefferson’s dictum, that the best government is the least government, that the very best government is on government at all. They want the government to go away. That is what holds together the conservative movement. It has been argued that,when those who subscribe to this ideology are in power they act as a wrecking crew that deliberately sabotages governmental competence privatizes core public responsibilities irresponsibly deregulates and ignores even encourages corruption in an effort to legitimate government.
Assuming that government will never go away is the next best thing that is inept graft ridden government a good thing? Some scholars think so.
Is graft good?
Some suggest that although corruption’s short term costs are embarrassingly obvious graft munificently paves the way for longer term prosperity. Grease money amounts to speed money in that bribes used to circumvent a blocking bureaucracy accelerate a nation’s economic development.
Ideas have power. The efficient grease hypothesis has long been used as a rationale to ignore rampant corruption in allocating international development funds consequently according to the world bank corruption has been treated as taboo subject by the development community for decades.
Facts belie the belief in efficient corruption actually retards economic development. None of the nineteen impoverished nations that have been granted debt service relief through the heavily indebted poor countries initiative is rated as having anything better than serious to severe governmental corruption.
The rate of investment in countries with high and unpredictable rates of corruption is almost half of that in low corruption countries. An analysis of more than a hundred countries over thirteen years found that when corruption increases by about two points on a ten point scale investment decreases by 4 percent and gross domestic product falls by half a percent. Corruption inflates the prices of goods by as much as a fifth and severely curtails income growth for the poor.
Governments are not immune. corruption slashes governments legitimate revenues by as much as halt and adds from 3 to 10 percent to the cost of public services because citizens must bribe officials to acquire those services.
The dollars lost to global corruption roughly match the annual budget of the federal government so obviously some people the corruptors are making a ton of money right? Well no. beibery costs even the bribes . three surveys of 2400 businesses in fifty eight nations found that firms that pay more bribes are also likely to spend more not less management time with bureaucrats negotiating regulations and face higher not lower not lower costs of capital. The more that firms pay in briber to corrupt officials the lower their annual growth rates.
When countries reduce corruption good things happen poverty and child mortality rates decrease and per capita income and literacy rates increase among other benefits.