a small population where it is almost a statistical certainty that persons in key leadership positions will be relatedPresumably also, there will be plenty of family ties between the government and the mafia. We know from something to be published shortly on my website that there are a large number of small arms floating around, presumably making Christmas a rather tense affair.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
An observation on corruption
In a report about corruption in Montenegro, I saw the interesting observation that a contributory factor to relatively high and stubborn corruption is
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
- It's your turn.
I did it last year.
- But I've done a lot for the family this year.
Such as?
- Produced a few corpses.
Oh well, OK, since there'll be less to do.
N.B. Corpsing "dying of laughter" not the same as Coppicing "producing lots of sprouts" (tho' also relevant to Xmas).
Cue corpsing!
I would have thought a much larger contributing factor would be lack of a respected central government and rule of law. I suspect the big deal in Montenegro is (partly) the collapse of communism and (partly) the collapse of the federal government - Montenegro was in a state of constitutional limbo for the best part of 15 years, and that sort of vacuum, rather than the size of the country, seems like the likelier reason for unscrupulous politicians giving jobs and contracts to their friends and families.
Of course, there probably is
a correlation between countries being small and them having weak governments (the nature of small countries being that they probably broke off a bigger one at some stage), I just think that the jobs-for-the-boys and small countries often have the same origin, rather than one having caused the other.
You don't hear much about corruption in Iceland, but there is plenty in Russia, Serbia, Italy*, Nigeria...
* Don't forget that Berlusconi first came to power when the entire political system of Italy imploded in 1994.
I suspect that is a more prominent factor in the report - i will look it up again when i am in blava - a related factor being the necessitz of corruption in a situation where organised crime rivals or dominates over the government in power and perhaps legitimacy. But as you might erxpect, i have a fondness for the encroachment of relatively simple mathematical rules into freely willed human relations ;)
Post a Comment