Corruption, defined here as the “abuse of public power for private gain” (World Bank 1997), has long been highlighted as an important consideration in development, and today is part of the wider ‘good governance’ agenda promoted by aid agencies (Doig and McIvor 1999). The assumption is straightforward. Corruption can result in the diversion of resources from the public good to private consumption and overall result in losing the impacts that were intended to be of wider benefit. Indeed Doig and McIvor (1999) state that corruption “has distorted development priorities, led to massive human and financial capital flight, and undermined social and political stability … corruption is deeply damaging to the social and political fabric, to investment, and to economic growth.” Given this statement it is no surprise that Hisamatsu (2003) states “it is difficult to overstate the economic and social significance of corruption”.
Causes of corruption are said to be many (World Bank 1997, Goudie and Stasavage 1998) but can broadly be divided into three aspects:
1. Opportunity. Included here will be aspects such as demand from foreign firms (Hisamatsu 2003) and ‘spaces of corruption’ where there is a lack of transparency combined with power (Zemanovicova 2002) and where there are “highly distorted policies” that create gaps between demand and supply (World Bank 1997).
2. Motive. This may be especially enhanced if salaries and living conditions of officials with opportunity are relatively poor (World Bank 1997).
3. Probability of being caught and punished. If this is low then corruption is likely to be encouraged. It should also be noted that corruption may actually be tolerated by citizens as a means of ‘making things happen’.
Corruption has not only been linked to social and economic development, but also to environmental sustainability (Lopez and Mitra 2000, Damania et al. 2003, Welsch 2004). While corruption is not environmentally destructive in a general sense (Robbins 2000) poor governance results in bad policy formulation, management, and enforcement, and this can become apparent through problems with environmental sustainability (Damania et al. 2003). Yet while there are many assumed cause-effect relationships between corruption and environmental sustainability there are few empirical analyses. One qualitative example focused on environmental regulation in the New York waste industry and how this interacts with organized crime is provided by Carter (1997). There are also examples that take a more quantitative approach by correlating measures of corruption with indicators of environmental sustainability in much the same way as others have tried with corruption and economic performance (Mauro 1995, Hall and Jones 1999). Since the turn of the century this has been facilitated somewhat by the emergence of the ‘high-profile’ Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI) for nation states. The ESI, first published in 2001 and subsequently in 2002 and 2005, has seen an increasing popularity at least in the popular media (Morse 2004, Morse and Fraser 2005) and has been overtly linked in the press to the rule of law:
“Finland and Norway have the most environmentally sustainable economies. The Environmental Sustainability Index is an assessment of dozens of variables that influence the environmental health of economies. One of the strongest determinants, besides wealth, seems to be good governance including a broad commitment to the rule of law” Economist (2002).
The ESI is by no means the only index or indicator of sustainability (Sutton and Costanza 2002), and an approach also gaining in interest is the estimation of Critical Natural Capital (CNC). The increasing popularity of the ESI is in part related to the fact that it is promoted by the powerful World Economic Forum (WEF), and its release coincides with high-profile WEF meetings. The ESI is a thorough index in the sense that the rationale, methodology, and component data sets are carefully laid out in widely available documentation (www.ciesin.columbia.edu/indicators/ESI/). This greatly facilitates the use of the ESI for relating environmental sustainability to economic performance (Morse and Fraser 2005) as well as corruption. Corruption, however unlike economic performance which can be proxied with measures such as gross domestic product (GDP) and gross national product (GNP), is a complex human behavior that is notoriously difficult to measure precisely because its very nature makes it opaque (Lambsdorff 1999, Hisamatsu 2003). Those benefiting from corruption are unlikely to say so and even more unlikely to say how much they receive. Those on the giving end may be less reticent to talk about the extent of corruption, but there is a danger of them exaggerating their problems by confounding difficult bureaucracies and different ways of doing business with corruption. As a result, empirical analysis of corruption is a relatively new endeavor (Lambsdorff 1999), but even so national measures typically based on perceptions of its prevalence do exist and the ESI includes one of them (World Bank Corruption Survey) as a component. A more widely reported metric is the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) published each year by the Berlin-based Transparency International (TI). Both of these indices reflect an increasing desire to measure complex characteristics of society and to present the results in a comparative format, in this case league tables.
In a recent and pioneering contribution Welsch (2004) uses the cross-national data available in the ESI 2002 data sets to explore the relationship between air and water pollution and corruption. For the latter he employed the World Bank Corruption Survey data in the ESI data set. Both ‘state’ (ambient) and ‘pressure’ (emissions) were included<1>, and the results suggest that there are two effects:
1. A direct effect, such that corruption interferes with monitoring, enforcement, etc. Hence, more corruption unambiguously corresponds with more pollution. As stated in the ESI 2005 report (Esty et al. 2005), “corruption contributes to lax enforcement of environmental regulations and an ability on the part of producers and consumers to evade responsibility for the environmental harms they cause”.
2. An indirect effect, as corruption is negatively related to prosperity, which in turn has more complex relationships with various measures of pollution. For low income countries an increase in GDP may increase pollution but there is a turning point beyond which increasing prosperity reduces pollution (Grossman and Krueger 1995).
As a result, “the effect of corruption on pollution is particularly strong in low income countries. Reducing corruption is therefore especially important for the less developed regions” (Welsch 2004). However, the linkage between ‘state’ and ‘pressure’ was unclear for some pollutants as emissions kept increasing beyond the point where ambient levels had peaked. Welsch (2004) puts this down to poor data quality for emissions such that values are underestimated, and suggests that this bias could be at least in part a result of corruption. Hence all of his subsequent analyses and conclusions deal only with state indicators. But how valid are such comparisons, even if they are addressing important questions, founded on highly aggregated indices expressed at national level? After all, deriving single values of environmental sustainability and corruption for a nation would appear to be simplistic in the extreme.
This paper aims to critically dissect the assumed relationship between corruption (independent variable; CPI) and environmental sustainability (dependent variable; ESI). Can such analyses yield valid insights into such an hypothesized relationship and what are the limitations inherent within such cross-national comparisons using simplified data sets? If insights can be derived then what are they?
Please read more from the source with thanks: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol11/iss1/art22/
Author: Dr. Harmander Singh
Be Happy Philselfologically: The Research on Free and Renewable Energy as Quantum, Classical and Sacred Systems! 🙂
