Removing a Roadblock to Development: Transparency International Mobilizes Coalitions Against Corruption

Abstract

year. This amount is 40 times the costs estimated by the United Nations for a global campaign to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS, ten times total annual development assistance spending, and nearly the GDP of the entire African continent. Yet even $1 trillion is a dramatic underestimate of the social and human cost of corruption. Corruption—the abuse of entrusted power for private gain—is a roadblock to human development. It distorts competitive markets, leads to the misallocation of resources, and disproportionately burdens the world’s poorest and most vulnerable. Human development is impeded whenever public contracts are awarded according to the size of the kickback instead of the size of the public benefit, whenever parents have to bribe teachers to educate their children, or whenever a mother is forced to watch her daughter die because she does not have the resources to bribe the hospital staff to provide care. Corruption makes a mockery of rights, breeds cultures of secrecy, deprives the neediest of vital public services, deepens poverty, and undermines hope. Yet, despite the evident corrosive impacts of corruption on development, until recently, there was no organized effort to combat either of its most harmful manifestations: the cross-border corruption that so frequently plagues large-scale public projects in poor countries, and the equally devastating small-scale corruption that mercilessly aggravates the daily obstacles faced by many of the world’s most disadvantaged citizens. In fact, only a decade ago, overseas bribery was legally permissible in most countries (the only exception was the United States, where in 1977, responding to the revelations about bribes to foreign public officials, which