Anti-corruption program in former Soviet countries

[KSLM]

Hi everybody,

We are second year International Business Administration students from Erasmus University Rotterdam. For one of our courses we have to write an essay about good governance in countries. As our topic we chose the following:

"The relation between "state capture" and corruption in former Soviet countries and to what extent does the World Bank influence the good governance of these countries through the anti-corruption program. Furthermore, how all this is affecting investment in the studied countries."




Attached you can find the first draft of our ideas about our final work.

We welcome any suggestions, help and comments regarding this topic.

[Stiofán]

Welcome from another Business Administration degree holder.

First a definition to help those lurking.

State capture has been defined as "the efforts of firms to shape the laws, policies, and regulations of the state to their own advantage by providing illicit private gains to public officials".

This is from Hellman and Kaufmann's writings on the subject.

Probably the biggest barrier to a proper capitalist society is corruption and bribery of elected officials by those few in many societies with the money to influence policy. It's not as apparent in all countries, but it does exist in all, to some degree. The number of Latin American and African countries, who have been nominally "democratic" and capitalist for decades, but where a rich ruling class controls nearly all business by corrupting the state officials is probably more the norm than not. The rest of the population is largely a poor peasent class. I would think one of the best ways to fight this would be a free and independant media, which exposes the corruption, but that is hard to come by in many countries. Even where you have one, there is only so much they can uncover about the corruption.

I don't have much expertise in Eastern European and Russian business systems, but other than the immediacy with which the capitalistic systems were set up, as opposed to them developing over time as in most other countries, the end result seems to be much the same.

[Coot]

Welcome! Well, you've stated a premise that is sound and the topic of much debate here with respects to many countries, including the FSU and the UN. Is there some portion of this you'd like to expand on for discussion?

[KSLM]

We were thinking of writing about the Russian Federation, Hungary, Poland and Ukraine. So if you know any juicy information about corruption going on in one of these countries feel free to contact us! http://www.globalaffairs.org/forum//images/smilies/smile.gif

Thank you very much for the definition!!!!

[ethics]

Are you serious on RFS?

There's corruption happening everywhere there, everyday.