The Importance Of Corruption In The Government

Petty corruption in infrastructure delivery and service affects common people. A will, and most importantly a political will, in the government structure is a prime mover to eradicate corruption. The significance of sustainable community development stems from the fact that it is often posed as a cluster solution to the problem of relative economic underdevelopment and the widespread poverty endemic to developing countries (Sachs, 2005). Environmental sustainability have become a prominent global issue and more and more plans are coming out about the use and preservation of natural resources. Robotics, nanotechnology, cloning, cyber intelligence, and genetic engineering are examples of newly developing technologies that hold the potential

At the same time, petty corruption leads to further inefficiency in service delivery as public officials fail to perform their duties in anticipation of obtaining bribes (Goel & Rich, 1989). This affects the quality of service provided and causes people to lose trust in their governments with a consequent disengagement from government policies. This apathy and indifference eventually leads to a loss of faith in the government generally. Corruption also has been found to present a significant challenge to sustainable development (Davis, 2004) that can cause the governance environment and institutions to weaken further (Kenny, 2007). Not surprisingly, Kaufmann et al. (2006) found that governance generally improves when day-to-day corruption in society is reduced. There are several methodological approaches that are generally used to measure the extent and affect of corruption. These include perception indicators, surveys, judicial system reports, and indirect and outcome indicators. A detailed discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of each of these methods can be found in Kenny (2009). However, a survey of service users is a practical first-order tool to estimate the perceived level of petty corruption

Most of them are associated with receiving or giving payment or obtaining or giving benefit or service illegally. However, it can also involve influence peddling through, for example, hidden financial relationships and campaign contributions that make those in public office “divert resources to benefit well-connected at the expense of the public interest”.2 The United Nations includes embezzlement (exploitation of position to steal public money) or any forms of misappropriation of public money, fraud, extortion, illicit enrichment, abuse of functions, nepotism, and exploiting conflict of interest as corruption.3 While many agree that corruption is damaging to the progress of a nation, accurately measuring the level of corruption and its cost to the country is a notoriously difficult task. To measure the level of corruption is difficult due to its secretive nature. Using the number of corruption cases reported to anti-corruption agency, or the number of corruption cases investigated and prosecuted does not give us the actual level of corruption and does not inform us whether the corruption level in a country has increased or decreased. An increase in the number of corruption cases reported, for example, does not necessarily indicate an increase in the actual incidence of corruption because it