Fighting Corruption with Pyramids

Abstract

In general, any study of corruption starts with the observation of situations which provide temptation for people to disregard the norms and rules, to which they should comply, and misuse entrusted public power for private gain. The power abuse is as old as humanity itself and has many faces and shapes. Corruption is one variety. The common definition of corruption in the literature so far was not reached because of its complexity which, according to Kim, includes numerous political, administrative and socially deviant behaviours. They all result from violation of legal and social norms and expectations. The fight against corruption is one of the highest priorities on the international agenda. The United Nations (UN), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Council of Europe with Group of States against corruption (GRECO), Transparency International, are some of the many that fight corruption as their main or supplementary goal. Based on their active work, numerous documents and rules, that contain results of various practices and approaches around the world, were enforced. Their main goal is to assist countries in improving the fight against corruption and countries signatories are expected to implement them as part of the domestic legal and institutional system. However, the results of these moves are questioned in the literature. The main argument is that countries around the world vary and the “one size fit all” approach cannot provide the desired outcome because it does not take into account specificities of a certain country or countries. In general, countries are divided into developed, developing and transitional and each of them, as well as the formal, also has different informal institutions. The required international anti-corruption unification applies to formal rules but that is usually only one side of the story. The other is the implementation which in general depends on informal institutions whose change requires time. The analysis in this research focuses on postsocialist, transitional countries and their fight against corruption. One remark which is important to make here is that this research only uses the term post-socialist country(ies) although in the literature this term is used interchangeably with post-communist country(ies). The explanation for this use is that none of the countries observed in this study reached the level of communism, which according to Marx should come after the socialism as its better version. Fortunately they stayed socialist for the whole period of existence.