 Waiting for their entitlements
The seminal difference between developed and developing nations appears to be the amount of trust they place in officials. The vast bulk of people are fair-minded but a few seek to exploit opportunities to enrich themselves. The more that corruption is overlooked, the more they will steal. And the more they get away with it, the more what they do is seen to be a normal way to get ahead.
There are many things that developed nations do that developing nations don’t; one of these is an unsympathetic view towards government officials who help themselves to the public purse.
Corruption, though, is a close relative of entitlement. Any society that feels that some historical slight gives the current people in power a manifest right to give themselves things they have not worked for will also encourage corruption. There is only a fragment of a shadow of a hair’s difference between mandating a legal right that goes against standard market practice and stealing something directly.
Consider the land “reform” process in Zimbabwe. The government identified that poverty was associated with landlessness and that peasants were unable to engage in subsistence farming without land. This lead directly to legislative initiatives to expropriate land from large-scale farmers and redistribute this to peasants. This created an entitlement in which peasants felt that they were entitled to land, whether they could do anything with it or not, whether it was theirs or not. Soon vast swathes of land was being reclaimed, often violently, and settled by unskilled peasants. Government officials took advantage of the confusion to snatch the most prized farms for themselves and use the army to protect that land.
Once fecund land fell into disuse since the new farmers had no idea how to farm. And Zimbabwe starves.
To fight corruption requires that governments in developing countries do something that is entirely counter-intuitive: stop ruling by popular decree. A populist government will appease the masses sense of poverty and despair by giving them entitlements to redistribute wealth. Redistributive policies will lead some people into thinking that, since they’re going to get it anyway, they may as well take it right now and not wait. Large-scale corruption follows and soon there isn’t anything left to take.
Tackling corruption requires investigation and incorrupt police and judiciary. This can be in short supply. Rather, nip the whole thing before it becomes rife by getting rid of any law that declares an entitlement; that anyone is entitled to something simply because of who they are rather than in earning it for themselves.
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