raferguson
May 5, 2003, 7:24 AM
Post #8 of 16
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What is corruption? Obviously many people do not consider a few pesos a bribe. However, if the trash man is receiving a salary from the city, but the citizens are required to give him a "propina" for him to haul their trash, then that "propina" is getting closer to a bribe. If the "propina" is only a few pesos at Christmas that is not a big deal. If the propina is more or less mandatory, then it looks more like a bribe. I am pretty sure that the trash man gets a salary from the city, but perhaps that is not true everywhere.
Now let's make it a bureaucrat. If you need to make an under-the-table payment to an individual to complete some paperwork in a timely manner, and the fee is not posted and is not going to the city, it probably is a bribe. I would guess that most of us would call that case a bribe. Similarly, if a policeman stops you for speeding, and you pay him on the spot to avoid a ticket, that is a bribe by most definitions.
There are some gray areas, of course. One of the points is that in a culture with a higher degree of corruption, a lot of things that would be considered improper in some cultures are just taken for granted, and considered normal and correct. Have you ever paid your trashman in the USA? (Other than perhaps a small Christmas gift).
A lot of what I am arguing here comes from a study of corruption in Mexico, and one of the points of the study was that Mexicans (and residents of Mexico) take a lot of these small payments for granted, but they should not. The idea was that everyone needs to stand up and stop all unofficial payments to officials, for the good of society. Why are you paying somebody to do their job when they already have a salary?
According to the study, many of the payments were described by those making them as a convenience, to save hassle and time, rather than as an absolute requirement to get something resolved. That goes into the question of tramites, if you have a lot of bureaucracy, then the system kind of encourages people to make these unofficial payments, to get around the hassle of the official process. And the bureaucrat has an incentive to make the process as long and complex as possible, to encourage "propinas" to expedite the process.
It is sort of like the "broken window" theory of crime, if you let people get away with small violations of the law, like spitting on the sidewalk, then the bigger violations, like drug dealing, thrive. Or you can look at it the other way, if small payments are part of daily life, then it is likely that big money is changing hands somewhere you do not see it. In other words, the cause-effect relationship between minor and major corruption may go in either direction, or even both ways. It is not a coincidence that Mexican Presidents and other officials leaving office are usually much richer than when they entered office.
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