Causes Of Corruption In Government

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Corruption is an issue that got major concern on almost all governments. According to World Bank (1997), corruption is “the abuse of public office for private gain”. Many countries, especially developing ones, are struggling to reduce corruption in government bureaucrats. Corruption among government officials is widespread from top to bottom level. It do not only happen on top level, where corruption is in form of political maneuver and policy making for profit gain, but also arise in middle to low level civil servants. This low level corruption is known as petty corruption. Petty corruption occurs in administrative or bureaucratic part of government where officials meet civil public and usually involves small amounts of money (Regional…show more content…
First, there is an assumption that corruption is driven by financial problems of civil servant. Paulo Mauro (Quah, 2001) suggests that “when civil service pay is too low, civil servants may be obliged to use their position to collect bribes as a way of making ends meet”. That is why petty corruption among low level civil servants is categorized as ‘corruption due to need’. Civil servants need to fulfill their personal and family basic necessities like buying food, paying bills, paying for kids’ education, or buying household items; and underpaid civil servants likely to corrupt to overcome this issue. Yoong (Quah, 2001) states that people corrupt to cope with low salaries and growing inflation and it become part of their life. Temptation of partake in taking bribes is higher when civil servants have economic pressures. By increasing salary, civil servants become more financially sufficient. This reduces initiative of civil servant for abusing their power to gain extra money. Salary increase also raise moral cost of moral cost of corruption. Civil servants with low salary will make justification over their corruption activities because their urge to have decent life. Petty corruption in government administration is also become more tolerable in public’s perspective because they realize that civil servants are…show more content…
It raises the stakes of engaging with corruption. Civil servants might consider for asking bribes because what they earn might not worth the risk. Banerjee (Quah, 2001) emphasize that lower salaries even could tempt the most rigidly honest officials to violate the law so they can hold their living standard. Salary level is a way to maintain the virtue of bureaucrats. Furthermore, it is important to put salary of government officials on the same level of workers in private sectors. Its purpose is for narrowing inequality gap between public and private sector. As long as people who working in government consider themselves as less fortunate than those who employed by non-government companies, stimulus for corruption is greater. Mahmood (2005) indicates that immense disparity between that two sectors as a main factor in spreading of

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