Page 249 - Cultures and Organizations

222 DIMENSIONS OF NATIONAL CULTURES

Since 1995 Transparency International (a nongovernmental organiza-
tion located in Berlin) has issued an online yearly Corruption Perception
Index (CPI) for a large number of countries, which combines information
from up to thirteen sources in business, the press, and the foreign ser-
vices. The index ranges from 10 for a perfectly “clean” country to 1 for an
extremely corrupt country. Our analysis of the 2008 CPI scores showed
that worldwide, they depended very strongly on national wealth—or rather
on national poverty. The wealthier half of the seventy-three countries for
which we had all the necessary data was also the cleaner half, and vice
versa; only four of the poorer countries were rated cleaner than average,

and only five of the wealthier countries were rated more corrupt than
average. 60

Under conditions of poverty, acquiring money in unofficial ways is not
simply a matter of greed; it may be a matter of survival. Offi cials, police

officers, and teachers in poor countries are often so poorly paid that with-
out side payments they cannot feed their families, and the habit of collect-
ing such payments pervades the entire system.
Among wealthier countries, differences in wealth no longer explain
differences in CPI. Instead, among the thirty wealthiest countries in our
data set, more than half of the differences in the 2008 CPI scores could be
61
explained by UAI. To Lord Acton, a nineteenth-century British politician
turned Cambridge professor, we owe a famous aphorism: “Power tends to
corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” This observation is prob-
ably still true, but more often, power is not absolute, but relative. In those
cases the less competent the citizens feel toward persons in authority, the
easier the latter get away with illegal practices.
Corruption, of course, presumes corruptors. Along with the CPI,
Transparency International periodically publishes a Bribe Payers Index

(BPI). Across twenty-two exporting countries, BPI 2008 scores were
not correlated with UAI but were inversely correlated with the export-
ing country’s national wealth—exporters from poorer countries such as
China and India pay more bribes. The exporting country’s power distance
also played a sizable role—exporters from countries with a higher PDI pay
more bribes. 62
Table 6.5 summarizes imortant differences between weak and strong
uncertainty- avoidance societies related to politics and the state.