TI Corruption Index is No Different Either

By SAI SOE WIN LATT

Transparency International (TI), a Berlin-based nongovernmental organization, released its 2008 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) on September 23. The survey ranked 180 countries around the world according to the performance of their respective governments on corruption in the public sector.

Myanmar [Burma] was ranked second worst after Somalia.

The first questionable aspect about the CPI is the nature of the study itself. As the name indicates, it is merely a “perception” of corruption. But whose perception is it? It's not the perceptions of those from nongovernmental public sectors (such as schools, health care, etc) or that of social/political activists and critics or a wider population. Rather, it is an impression of a few, selected, so-called “experts” from the private sector, economic/business executives, and middle-ranking managerial staff from major companies and financial institutions.

The second and most obvious flaw in TI’s data is that it has simply presented a quantitative study showing only nation states’ numbers and ranks without any explanation about why and how corruption takes place. As corruption is shown to be overwhelmingly prominent in the Third World, the survey simply blames the Third World for its own corruption.

The title of TI's press release is "Persistently High Corruption in Low-Income Countries Amounts to an ‘Ongoing Humanitarian Disaster.’” However, the corruption within low-income countries is not limited to the governments alone. Instead, it is embedded in the histories of these countries where they have been forced to join a global system of free market economy alongside decolonization and cold war politics.

Throughout history, corrupt and authoritarian regimes in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East have been installed and supported by rich nations. Yet, rich countries' collective guilt does not prove the innocence of Third World regimes, such as that of Burma.

The Burmese junta is not a monolith. Its power base and military might are fortified by multinational corporations from the so-called high income countries. The classic example is the operation of the US-based Unocal and French Total oil companies, which provide annual premiums for resource extraction that provide not only financial security to the regime, but intensify oppression and corruption in the state.

First World institutions and companies undoubtedly play a dirty hand in perpetuating the corrupt and authoritarian regimes in the Third World, and are therefore contributing to this “ongoing humanitarian disaster.”

This government-based approach raises a question of private sector corruption that affects people's lives profoundly. TI claimed that "unchecked levels of corruption would add US $50 billion—or nearly half of annual global aid outlays—to the cost of achieving the MDGs (Millennium Development Goals) on water and sanitation."

Yet, following the US-based Lehman Brothers Inc's recent bankruptcy and the subsequent destabilization of the entire global financial system, is not the Bush administration’s attempts to bailout the financial sector to the tune of $700 billion much worse than the cost of Third World corruption?

Or when a Chinese dairy company withholds information from consumers about chemical contamination in their products, are we to assume that this is the type of private sector operation that TI trusts to draw its data from?

While the CPI survey looks like a political project, the truth is that it is yet another World Bank/IMF-type production that paints the Third World as “the white man's burden.”

Put differently, this is just a different way of regarding the Third World and its peoples as “governable subjects,” in the words of late French scholar Michel Foucault. That is, by labeling the Third World “problematic,” the so-called aid organizations can expand their agendas to govern the Third World in the name of problem-solving.

This is not my cynical assumption—it is explicitly mentioned in the TI press release, which is jam-packed with terminology such as “humanitarian disaster,” “a matter of life and death,” “horrendous consequences,” and “the global fight against poverty;” all of which are the offspring of corruption and threaten to derail the UN’s MDGs.

The CPI concluded that “Not only does this call for a redoubling of efforts in low-income countries ... it calls for a more focused and coordinated approach by the global donor community to ensure development assistance is designed to strengthen institution of governance and oversight in recipient countries...”

Transparency International's CPI is worth considering as it sheds light on the persistence of corruption in the world (not only Third World). But, the questions concerning its rationality and methodology—as well as who produces this and for what ends—must be asked before accepting it uncritically.

Sai Soe Win Latt is a PhD student of Geography at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada.