From 8th July, 2006.
If you want to be rich, you can try to set up a brilliantly successful company. Or you can steal money. Trans-parency International, the corruption watchdog, has estimated that Mohamed Suharto embezzled up to $35bn when he was Indonesia’s president, a figure that is in the same league as the entrepreneurial fortunes of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. On a humbler scale, we all face the same choice. We can try to earn money by doing something useful, or we can try to steal or extort it from other people. A society where most people are doing something useful has a good chance of being rich; a society full of corruption will be poor.
That is a glib enough explanation of wealth and poverty, but what causes corruption? Many economists believe that corruption is a response to perverse incentives. For example, in Indonesia it takes an average of 151 days to legally establish a small business, according to the World Bank’s “Doing Business” database. This is a large incentive to pay bribes or keep a business unregistered. It is not surprising that there is a strong correlation between red tape and corruption…
Continued at timharford.com.
