WORLD BANK CHIEF
ECONOMIST FOR
AFRICA DENOUNCES
‘QUIET CORRUPTION’
IDEAS Today interviews World Bank Africa Chief
Economist Shanta Devarajan
Shantayanan Devarajan is the Chief Economist of the World Bank’s Africa
Region. Since joining the World Bank in 1991, he has been a Principal Economist
and Research Manager for Public Economics in the Development Research
Group, and the Chief Economist of the Human Development Network and of
the South Asia Region.
Shanta Devarajan spoke to IDEAS Today about the much under-reported phenomenon, which he terms ‘quiet corruption’. As
opposed to the scandals making the headlines, ‘quiet corruption’ refers to the failure of public servants to effectively deliver goods
and services, which have previously been paid for by the government or donors. The most prominent examples are absentee
teachers in public schools and absentee doctors in primary clinics. Quiet corruption also refers to the black markets and the cases
when sanitary material or medicines ‘disappear’ before being used for patients, or when fertilizer gets watered down in many
rounds before it gets –by then rather uselessly—to the fields it was allocated for. Those affected are often the most vulnerable
and Mr. Devarajan hopes that by raising awareness, the World Bank report ‘Quiet and Lethal: How Quiet Corruption Undermines
Africa’s Development Efforts’ will help bring those responsible to account.
How do you define quiet corruption?
Quiet corruption is the failure to deliver goods or services paid for by governments. It is pervasive
and widespread across Africa and is having a disproportionate effect on the poor. Quiet corruption
leads to an increasingly negative expectation of service delivery systems, causing families to ignore
the system.
Who does it affect most?
Quiet corruption, although smaller in monetary terms than other types of corruption, is particularly
harmful for the poor, who are more vulnerable and more reliant on government services and public
systems to satisfy their most basic needs.
Oxfam Chief Executive Barbara Stocking echoed a criticism that many in civil society make to
your report: that it’s easy for the World Bank to pick on lazy doctors or absent teachers, when in
fact these are the symptoms of the problem, not the cause. I welcomed Ms Stocking’s expressing
her concern about our messaging around our documentation of teacher and health worker
absenteeism. But I think we agree on two important matters: that we need to improve the delivery
of basic services, and that accountability failures are the cause of the problem.
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So, are the public servants to blame?
Rather than putting blame on individuals, it is important to note
Why did it take until now to focus on quiet
corruption?
that quiet corruption exists as a consequence of failures in the
Identifying and detecting quiet corruption is not as obvious as
service delivery chain. The solution lies in increasing accountability
loud corruption. It was only after the emergence of new survey
at different levels—especially in increasing poor people’s ability
tools, such as Public Expenditure Tracking Surveys and Quantitative
to hold service providers accountable—and building the evidence
Service Delivery, which enabled researchers to track resources and
base to understand what works and what doesn’t in achieving
monitor public service delivery, that we could raise questions and
this goal.
examine this issue.
How do you intend the report to help the
illiterate? Will this meet expectations on the
ground?
What plans are there for future reports?
Our expectation is that, by raising awareness about quiet
identifying and measuring quiet corruption.
We are planning to revisit quiet corruption in the near future with
the availability of new waves of surveys and other tools used for
corruption and its consequences, civil society in countries will be
better equipped to increase pressure on governments towards
more and better governance and accountability. This is perhaps the
***
most efficient and legitimate way to help the illiterate and meet
Cristina Barrios is an Associate of the LSE IDEAS Transatlantic
expectations on the ground.
Relations Programme and Paul Nolan is a freelance journalist.
You can find the report ‘Quiet and Lethal: How Quiet Corruption Undermines Africa’s Development Efforts’, as well as the ‘2010
Africa Development Indicators’ in the Africa Development Institute-World Bank’s website. You can follow the discussion around
this topic in Mr. Devarajan’s blog ‘Africa Can’.
The conflict in Afghanistan looms large in the collective consciousness
of Americans. What has the United States achieved, and how
will it withdraw without sacrificing those gains? The Soviet Union
confronted these same questions in the 1980s, and Artemy
Kalinovsky’s history of the USSR’s nine-year struggle to extricate itself
from Afghanistan and bring its troops home provides a sobering
perspective on exit options in the region.
A Long Goodbye is the first comprehensive account of the Soviet
Withdrawal in Afghanistan. Based on newly available archival material
and supplemented by interviews with major actors, Kalinovsky
reconstructs the fierce debates among Soviet diplomats, KGB officials,
the Red Army, and top Politburo figures. The fear that withdrawal
would diminish the USSR’s status as leader of the Third World is
palpable in these disagreements, as are the competing interests of
Afghan factions and the Soviet Union’s superpower rival in the West.
This book challenges many widely held views about the actual costs
of the conflict to the Soviet leadership, and its findings illuminate the
Cold War context of a military engagement that went very wrong, for
much too long.
Dr Artemy Kalinovsky is Assistant Professor at the University of
Amsterdam, and an Associate of the Cold War Studies Programme|.
He was Pinto Post-Doctoral Fellow at LSE IDEAS in 2009-10.
Available 04/04/2011
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