Project Syndicate
The Next Battle in China’s War on Corruption
Andrew Sheng, Distinguished Fellow of the Asia Global Institute at the University of Hong Kong, member of the UNEP Advisory Council on Sustainable Finance, former chairman of the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission, and currently an adjunct professor at Tsinghua University; and Xiao Geng, President of the Hong Kong Institution for International Finance and professor at the University of Hong Kong.
3 comments:
I have a book written by two economic professors which looked into privatization in the US where they found that public services cost 2 to 3 times more after they had been privatised. What whacked up the price was that private companies don't deliver the services they are paid to provide so extra bureaucracy is needed to police them. This reminds me of want David Graeber says -
'The London School of Economics anthropologist David Graeber frames the problem in terms of how political actors approach bureaucracy. As Graeber points out, those on the political right condemn excessive bureaucracy. Yet their solution – to reduce the role of the state and allow market forces to take over – is actually what fuels cumbersome bureaucratic expansion.
Graeber sums up this argument in what he calls an “iron law of liberalism”: “any market reform, any government initiative intended to reduce red tape and promote market forces, will have the ultimate effect of increasing the total number of regulations, the total amount of paperwork, and the total number of bureaucrats the government employs.” In other words, markets can work efficiently only with the guidance of a competent, honest, and fair state, with effective protections against abuses and graft from both the market actors who offer bribes and the officials who accept them.'
It was in the news the other day that corruption in China is so bad that it could bring the whole system down.
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