Major corruption comes close whenever major events involving large sums of money, multiple ‘players’, or huge quantities of products (think of food and pharmaceuticals) often in disaster situations, are at stake. Preferably, corruption flourishes in situations involving high technology (no one understands the real quality and value of products), or in situtions that are chaotic. Think of civil war: who is responsible and who is the rebel? Natural disasters like earthquakes, floods, droughts. The global community reacts quickly but local government might be disorganised and disoriented. Who maintains law and order? Or maybe the purchase of a technologically far advanced aircraft, while only a few can understand the technologies implied in development and production of such a plane. Mostly , the sums of money involved are huge, a relatively small amount of corrupt payment is difficult to attract attention. Or the number of actions is very large, for instance in betting stations for results of Olympic Games or international soccer-tournaments which can easily be manipulated. Geo-politics might play a role like e.g. the East-West conflict did in the second half of the 20th century, in which the major country-alliances sought support from non-aligned countries.
Fighting corruption takes place in many ‘theaters’:
political reforms, including the financing of political parties and elections;
economic reforms, regulating markets and the financial sector;
financial controls: budget, bookkeeping, reporting;
Public supervision: media, parliament, local administrators and councils, registration;
free access to information and data;
maintaining law and order;
improving and strengthening of the judicial system;
institutional reforms: Tax systems, customs, public administration in general;
whistleblowers and civil society organisations (NGO’s).
We know that corruption will not disappear from society. Our efforts are meant to restrict corruption and to protect as much as possible the poor and weak in our societies. In the end all corruption costs are paid by the consumer and the tax-payer. They need protection.
The small corruption (peanuts, facilitation payments – allowed by the OECD!) do not cost much but are awksome to the public. It is less damaging in total amounts but it makes it difficult to understand why we fight the grand corruption if we fail to fight the small ‘bakshis’. Major corruption thrives on a broad base of small corruption-payments or bribes.