Effects of corruption Essay

1. Introductionin philosophical, theological, or moral discussions, crookedion is spiritual or moral dross or deviation from an ideal. Corruption may include many activities including bribery and embezzlement. Government, or political, vitiatedion occurs when an office-holder or separate regimeal employee acts in an ex officio capacity for personal gain. Corruption has been a major problem in our clownish Kenya, affecting individuals all over the country. Most problems facing the country mountain be associated with convoluteion, starting with unemployment which has seen the rate of jobless Kenyans go up each and every year, tribal wars which saw the country almost to flames in the year 2007, crimes, which argon as a result of the increased rate of unemployment, national debts e.g. the Anglo-leasing which has seen the government spend billions trying to repay the debt.2. ObjectivesThe study has two objectivesFirst, it aims to review the essential elements of the mingled appro aches that have been used to analyse the causes and effects of corruption.Second, it aims to explore how research has been applied in growth countries. This is a question of what policy recommendations have been made, and what might be learned from the anti-corruption campaigns and policies applied in specific countries.3. Research questions1. To what extent has corruption penetrated into our society today2. How hascorruption affected our way of lives today3. Which population (the young person or the old) be mostly affected by corruption4. Which characters in our society influence corruption5. What is the major contributor to high levels of corruption in Kenya today6. What role can the government play to bring an end or reduction to corruption7. How can Kenyans ensure that corruption is eradicated from our system8. What atomic number 18 the benefits of living in a corruption-free country4. /Literature reviewCorruption has recently become a major issue in world(prenominal) adv ocate policies. However, behind the screens it has always been at that place, referred to as the c-word. The major concern for transnational aid policy through the last five decades is to improve the living conditions for the poor in the poorest countries of the world. This endeavour requires a close co-operation with the national governments in poor countries. Generally speaking, however, the governments in poor countries are also the most corrupt. This is one of the few take place empirical results of recent research on corruption. The level of GDP per capita holds most of the explanatory power of the various corruption indicators. Consequently, if donors want to minimise the risk of foreign aid being contaminated by corruption, the poorest countries should be avoided. This would, however, make aid policy rather pointless.This is the basic dilemma corruption raises for aid policy. Unlike international business most development aid governings and international finance instituti ons have the lions share of their activities located in highly corrupt countries. The international community in ecumenical and round donor countries in particular are, however, increasingly willing to fight corruption. Within the good governance strategies of the World rim and the International Monetary Fund initiatives to curb corruption are given priority. OECD and the UNDP have also developed particular anti-corruption programmes to assist governments in tackling the problem. Furthermore, several zygomorphic development agencies have placed anti-corruption efforts high on their development agenda.Whether this is a desirable change in focus of aid policy, and, hence, whether it is possible to find viable policy instruments to fight corruption, remains to be explored. Corruption is a problem that mainly arises in the interaction between government and themarket economy where the government itself must be considered endogenous. Therefore it is complex to handle from a theoreti cal point of view. This difficulty is underlined by the fact that data are difficult to gather, and, if available, data are often soft, unreliable and masked. Moreover, from an aid organisations point of view the issue of anti-corruption may become diplomatically delicate since at least some of the 7 stakeholders who are handling the aid instruments in the partner countries, are likely to be part of the problem.5. Research methodologyThe methods employ were the use of observation questionnaire and interview. Observation come to watching and listening to what people are doing in groups and also what they are watching when in cyber cafes or at home using televisions and also observing what the reaction is when the topic of corruption is introduced. The questionnaire involved a series of questions directed to parents or guardians and another directed to youths and children. They were aimed at finding out how parents and youth view the aspect of corruption The parents or guardians qu estionnaire consisted of sections which were Closed terminate questions (which required a YES or NO answer)Open ended questions (respondent free to answer in his/her own words) The youths and childrens questionnaire consisted ofClosed ended questions (which required a YES or NO answer)The other method used was interviewing where there was a one on one with the respondent and the questions to be asked would revolve the topic of corruption that is the accessibility moral social and health effects.6. Data line of battleIdeally the data applied in research on corruption should be based on direct and first-hand observations of corrupt transactions made by un turned observers who are familiar with the rules and routines in the celestial sphere under scrutiny. More aggregate numbers should then be constructed on the basis of such observations. This patient of of empirical studies hardly exist, however, and for obvious reasons we cannot stock many more in the near future. Most ofthe ti me we are dealing with complex transactions fetching place in large hierarchies to which independent researchers normally have no access, nor the appropriate social networks for picking up and checking data. The information is indirect and, until recently, rather unsystematic. wizard of the major difficulties in corruption research has consequently been the lack of a solid empirical basis.The observational basis of corruption researchIn countries with ripe judiciaries, the most reliable information most corruption is speak to cases. Courts are spending huge resources on establishing which transactions have in fact taken place, and to judge whether they have actually been corrupt. The problem with court cases is that they are few, compared to the vestigial number of corrupt acts, that they cannot be used neither as an indicator of sector occurrences nor of general frequency. For the same reasons court data are difficult to use for cross-country comparisons. They are likely to tell more about political priorities or the efficiency of judiciaries and patrol than about the underlying problem of corruption. Such data on corruption has nevertheless been collected on an international basis and some efforts have been made to make them comparable across countries, for instance by the Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Division of the United Nations Office in Vienna (United Nations 1999).However, the fact that Singapore and Hong Kong have exceptionally high conviction rates confirms the suspicion that data from courts cases on corruption, when aggregated, are telling more about judiciary efficiency than about corruption frequencies12. They do, nevertheless, bring interesting and often very detailed descriptions of the social mechanisms involved. In addition to the court cases, the police and other investigation units are producing considerable information about instances of corrupt transactions, also when the information may not be precise enough to win court cases or to fire employees. The quality of this information is highly variable, ranging from cases almost ready to bring to court, to mere rumours.13 In some cases this information may be sufficiently extensive to construct risk patterns for entire sectors, but in most cases it will be biased in the sense that active, strongly motivated police units will tend to exaggerate the number and the danger of the crooks they arehunting.Investigative journalists are in many ways in a better piazza to collect data than social scientists. The public exposure of journalists gives them a larger supply of informants. They will often have to handle the data carefully, since good stories petition the naming of actors with the obvious possibility of harming innocent individuals. The risk of being sued necessitates caution. Like the police, journalists possess much surplus information that they cannot use. This means that stories from the media are important sources of information also for social science research on corruption when it comes to establishing facts14. Media are also important subjects of research on corruption, mainly for political scientists. Some forms of corruption may be considered as a kind of political scandals, and the political effects may often be quite similar to the publication of individual(a) misbehaviour of politicians or their families.Media are not all important in bringing forward facts about corruption, but also for forming public and scientific lores of corruption. Moreover, the media are to a large extent setting the stage for determining the likely political consequences of revealed corruption scandals. Like court decisions, media sources have their evident biases when comparing corrupt transactions across countries and across time. Firstly, the media will tend to give priority to the more spectacular stories, making the less dramatic but more super C practices of corruption less guardianship. Secondly, and more important, the number o f stories on corruption that are reaching the public are not likely to be determined only by how many stories that exist out there, but is also a question of press freedom, of the market for corruption stories, the journalistic professionalism and resources available, and various kinds of journalistic bandwagon effects.The bias created is likely to be weighty also when it comes to empirical research because of the need to rely on second hand information. This makes it almost impossible to determine whether the perception of increasing corruption levels worldwide is based on facts or not, because the main sources used are likely to be strongly influenced by shifts in media attention and public opinion. As far as we know, unlike the case of criminal convictions for corruption, no international counting of media stories has been attempted. It is clear that the actual occurrences of discovered and provable corrupt acts discovered through courts, media and the few instances of participa tory research aretoo few in most countries to constitute a representative sample of the underlying corrupt transactions. To create patterns and analyses, researchers have to bring in information that is relatively unreliable, and then try to process it and make explicit the large and hardly judicable margins of error in the field.Or alternatively, researchers can decide to let the uncertain and imprecise information about patterns pass, and consider it as not amenable to serious research. Until recently, the last strategy has been the dominant one, but since the mid-1990s a number of quantitative studies have been published based upon quite subjective and commercial-grade indexes of aggregate country levels of corruption. The first and most influential one was Mauro (1995) who brought corruption into the renewed field of economic growth studies among economists. It was an econometric study of the effects of country corruption level on the growth rate, and the results indicated, as discussed in chapter 7.4, that there was indeed a significant negative impact. The study was based on data on general country corruption levels. What kind of data had Mauro been able to find?Corruption measured The construction of corruption indicators Mauro (1995) used mainly data from a commercial organisation, Business International (BI), which in 1980 made an extensive survey of a large number of commercial and political risk factors, including corruption, for 52 countries, among these several developing countries. Business International had an international network of correspondents (journalists, country specialists, and international businesspeople) who were asked about whether and to what extent business transactions in the country in question involved corruption or questionable payments.The perceived degree of corruption involved in these transactions was ranked on a scale from 0 to 10. BI also made efforts to make the rankings across correspondents consistent. In fact, Bus iness International was not the only organisation that tried to monitor where international businesses have to expect the most extensive or frequent bribe demands. Quite a number of both profit and non-profit organisations constructed similar indexes. Today it is Transparency Internationals Corruption learning Index (CPI) that is the most well known and most used both in research and in the public debate.The Corruption Perception Index (CPI)The CPI is the most comprehensive quantitative indicator of cross-country corruption available, where each single country is recognisable. It is compiled by a team of researchers at Gttingen University, headed by Johann Lambsdorff. The CPI assesses the degree to which public officials and politicians are believed to accept bribes, take illicit payment in public procurement, embezzle public funds, and open similar offences. The index ranks countries on a scale from 10 to zero, according to the perceived level of corruption. A score of 10 represe nts a reputedly altogether honest country, while a zero indicates that the country is perceived as completely corrupt15. The 1999 corruption perception index includes 99 countries. It is based on 17 different polls and surveys conducted by 10 independent organisations, not by TI itself16. None of these surveys are dealing with corruption only, but they cover a number of issues of relevance for development and business confidence.TI, however, is using only the data on corruption. Hence, the Transparency International index is not based upon information from the organisations own experts but is constructed as a weighted average of (for 1999) 17 different indexes from 10 different organisations. The majority of these indexes are based on fairly vague and general questions about the level or frequency of corruption perceived either by experts or business managers. About half are based upon expert opinions within built checks to ensure cross-country consistency. The other half is mainl y based on questionnaires sent to middle and upper-level management to either international or local firms. Only one organisation (i.e., International Working Group, developing the International Crime Victim Survey) asks the respondents straight off about their own experience of corruption.Thus, the CPI is mainly a poll of polls, reflecting the impressions of business people and risk analysts who have been surveyed in a garland of ways17. According to TI, none of these sources combines a sufficiently large sampling frame with a convincing methodology to produce reliable comparative assessments. Hence, TI has opted for a composite index as the most statistically robust means of measuring perceptions of corruption. Each of the other surveys uses different sampling frames and varying methodologies. The definition of the construct corruption also varies between the surveys. Thus, we may question whether the surveys cover thesame phenomenon (see Lambdsorff, 1999b). Furthermore, all th e surveys ask for the extent the phenomenon, although the meaning of extent is not obvious. Is it the frequency of corrupt transactions or the amount of bribes paid or money embezzled?7. referencesHamilton , Alexander (2013), Small is beautiful, at least in high-income democracies the distribution of policy-making responsibility, electoral accountability, and incentives for rent extraction Morris, S.D. (1991), Corruption and Politics in Contemporary Mexico. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa Senior, I. (2006), Corruption The Worlds Big C., Institute of Economic Affairs, London semblance. U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre. Retrieved 26 June 2011. Lorena Alcazar, Raul Andrade (2001). Diagnosis corruption. pp. 135136. ISBN 978-1-931003-11-7 Znoj, Heinzpeter (2009). Deep Corruption in Indonesia Discourses, Practices, Histories. In Monique Nuijten, Gerhard Anders. Corruption and the secret of law a legal anthropological perspective.