Cleanest government money can buy

Bloomberg:

One way for Asian countries, home to a big share of the world’s households living on $2 per day, to boost their economies is to increase the pay of their civil servants. […]

Of course, throwing money at corruption won’t make it go away. If it did, countries such as Kenya, which pays its members of Parliament handsomely — more than $13,000 a month — would be paragons of virtue instead of cellar-dwellers in Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perceptions Index.

Decent salaries are just one incentive that can tilt the cost-benefit analyses of potential bribe-takers toward probity: More important than reducing the potential financial benefits of corruption is increasing the probability of detection and meaningful punishment.

Having an independent and robust news media would help with detecting corruption, but that’s something that is not often mentioned. The level of journalism in Singapore still has some ways to go, as evidenced by the recent corruption case involving two top officials. The news only broke several weeks after they had been arrested!

26. January 2012 by Han Sheng
Categories: opinion, singapore | Leave a comment

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