Quote Originally Posted by Crocodile View Post
That's an interesting topic. What do you think might be the reasons? What's the recipe to fight corruption?
Yes, I think that freedom from corruption is a major factor for building a successful state.
If you can't trust that the state is going to behave according to the law, then there is nothing that you can trust in society.
If people can't trust that they will get good healthcare when they are sick, that their co workers actually have the skills that their degree would indicate.... that state officials will certain tasks within a prescribed period....

In Northern Europe it has not been a major problem for the last 100 years, maybe never, I am not sure. For me, it's almost impossible to imagine a corrupt policeman, judge or university staff member. They can be annoying or unpleasant, but not corrupt.

One thing that Northern Europe (West) has in common is Lutheran/protestant Christianity. Maybe there is something from that religion.
Surely it helps if the police is quite well paid, and there are less social differences between people; i.e. the policemen don't need the bribes and people couidn't afford to pay a lot of bribes anyway.

In Sweden the idea is that we are too good and honest people to be involved with such corruption, that is something that less evolved nations do. People simply wouldn't do it. However with recent immigration, there have been incidents of corruption - always with immigrants.

Singapore was a totally rotten society when it became indpendent. Everyone was corrupt. The leader there hated corruption and put in place really strict punishments for corruption and made it hard to get off clean for those who got caught. The punishments were so strict that people simply did not dare...
Of course, as a dictator , Lee Kuan Yew had the power to implement these changes just on the merit that he thought they were good. In a democracy, too many people would be against.

I think corruption ought to be a top priority to combatin Russia. The state can never be successful as long as it exists.

I just read that Ikea started production in Belarus, for the Russian market. The reason was that they have an extremely strict policy against using bribes, and they found that they couldn't get anything done in Russia without bribes. Logically the production should have been in Russia, it would have made better economic sense. But they simply could not do it, but in Belarus, no bribes were needed (but lots of paperwork and bureacracy, I would guess!)