Anti-Corruption Strategies for the Philippines

November 17 2010

The Hills Program on Governance at the Asian Institute of Management and The Asia Foundation brought academics to assess areas of corruption vulnerabilities in the Philippines and to develop recommendations for strategies to address those vulnerabilities. Business leaders, government officials, academics, and civil society leaders, provided their insights on governance. Findings and recommendations are presented in Political and Social Foundations for Reform: Anti-Corruption Strategies for the Philippines, launched on Nov. 8, 2010, in Makati. Below is an excerpt.

Corruption – entrenched, persistent, lucrative, and usually facing relatively weak constraints – is a major cause, and consequence, of the Philippines’ persistent problems of economic development and democratic consolidation. No one would attribute all of the nation’s problems to corruption, and in no way does corruption negate all that is good about the nation and its people.

Still, corruption has helped produce a chronically ill economy; spectacular inequalities of wealth and privilege; a weak-but-heavy state; political processes that are contentious but rarely decisive, save in the sense of giving one elite faction advantages over others; representative institutions that are part of the country’s elite- and faction-driven political pattern, rather than aggregating and expressing grassroots interests; a judiciary facing many threats to its independence, and in need of shoring up its own credibility; and a citizenry that must contend with poverty while coping with all of the above. Moreover, each of those problems, among others, creates opportunities and incentives for further abuses. If, as I will suggest in the pages to come, corruption is such an embedded problem – not something that “happens to” a society, but rather an outgrowth of history, culture, problems of development, and contemporary difficulties in the way the society governs itself and organizes its economy – what, if anything, can be done?

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This book focuses on a gradual approach to a corrupt-resistant society. Our choices are simple: either adopt a strategy of corruption-busting, or the poor become poorer.

This book is downloadable for free - cut and paste the following, to your browser (53 pages, 1.1 mb)

http://asiafoundation.org/in-asia/2010/11/17/new-book-reveals-anti-corruption-strategies-for-the-philippines/