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Conceptualizing Corruption - Robert M. Price: Society and Bureaucracy in Contemporary Ghana University of California Press, 1975, xiv + 261 pages. £12.20.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2014
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References
1 For reasons which will become obvious the best situation, being corrupt when all else are honest, does not seem a likely outcome in Ghana.
2 See R. Rajkumar, Political Corruption in Ghana, 1951–1966, Exeter University Ph.D., 1974 ch.i. A problem arises here concerning the legal rules which, by definition, cannot cover all varieties of behaviour and which, therefore, are likely to allow as legal or not illegal activities believed to be detrimental to effective organization; see K. E. de Graft-Johnson, ‘Adrmnistration and Corruption in Ghana’, paper read to Institute of Development Studies (Sussex) Conference on Administrative Reform in 1975.
3 See esp. Gerth, H. H. and Wright Mills, C., From Max Weber, Routledge, London, 1970, ch. 8.Google Scholar
4 It is, however, perfectly possible to extend the term as might a Marxist thinking of a bureaucracy as acting to contain intra elite and inter class struggle and thereby sustain an unjust society.
5 On a smaller sample of illiterates 74.2% expected better treatment (p. 105). See pp. 152–3 for evidence that civil servants have a ‘status salary gap’.
6 See Tilman, R. O., ‘Emergence of Black-Market Bureaucracy’, Public Administration Review, vol. 28, 1968, pp. 440–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Scott, J. C., Comparative Political Corruption, Prentice-Hall, New Jersey, 1972.Google Scholar
7 This is a trifle unfair since Professor Price does recognize that the traditional-modern sectors do interact e.g. p. 38.
8 It will be clear by the end of this essay that although I do not reject the concept of a gap I do believe that Price fails to locate the historical origins of such gaps in Ghanaian society and also fails to provide a sufficiently complex model of such gaps.
9 For a historical dimension see Holt, R. H. & Turner, J. E., The Political Basis of Economic Development, Van Nostranel, London, 1966.Google Scholar
10 See Kay, G. B., The Political Economy of Colonialism in Ghana, Cambridge University Press, 1972 pp. 3–36.Google Scholar
11 For a truly mind-boggling list see LeVine, V. T., Political Corruption: The Ghana Case, Hoover Institution Press, Stanford, 1975, pp. 101–3.Google Scholar
12 Sec, for example, Owusu, Maxwell, Uses and Abuses of Political Power, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1970.Google Scholar
13 See Rajkumar, op. cit., pp. 159–61 and Austin, D., Politics in Ghana, Oxford University Press, 1954, p. 253.Google Scholar
14 See Esseks, J. D., ‘Indigenous Private Enterprise in Ghana’, journal of Modern African Studies, vol. 9, 1971, pp. 11–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
15 See for example, Economic Development, B. Higgins (Norton, N.Y. 1968) for a general review of the field; Bauer, P. T., West African Trade, London, 1963 Google Scholar, for a regional study; A. Nyfam, Market Trade, University of Ghana, 1960 and Polly Hill, Studies in Rural Capitalism, Cambridge University Press, 1970, for studies of Ghanaian small traders and businessmen; for a cautious contrary view see Garlick, P., African Traders and Economic Development in Ghana, Oxford University Press, 1971.Google Scholar
16 TiIman, op. at., ‘Corruption, as I have employed the term here, involves a shift from a mandatory pricing model to a free-market model’.
17 Similar results occur if the supply curve is shitted to the right by, for example, a subsidy (international smuggling of cocoa involved corruption of customs officers) and it would be simple to alter the profile of ABC in accordance with more or less realistic assumptions about price elasticity of demand together with varying assumptions about the degree of competition within the bureaucracy for bribes.
18 By 1965 there were 198 central government units of which 47 were State Enterprises and were regarded by high level personnel running them ‘as their private domain’ and to be ‘run as if they were chief classes’: Greenstreet, D. ‘Public Corporations in Ghana During the Nkrumah Era’ The African Review, vol. 3, 1968, pp. 21–31 Google Scholar. Between 1951 and 1961 the percentage of government employees to private wage earners increased from 4.3% to 61% and expenditure from $39m to $22m of which 54% was spent on salaries, offices, pensions, loans to officers etc., LeVine, op. cit., p. 90.
19 That is, looked at from the demand side, corruption may be regarded as a form of vertical integration in a situation of planned scarcity or uncertainty – c.f. the ‘fixer’ in Soviet factories and Mr Poulson in the U.K.
20 Scott, op. cit., p. viii, ‘Far from being pathological, patterns of corruption and violence may actually represent channels of political demand without which formal societal arrangements would scarcely survive.’ Abueva, J. V., ‘The Contribution of Nepotism, Spoils and Graft to Political Development’, in Heidenheimer, A. (ed.) Political Corruption, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1970, pp. 534–9Google Scholar: ‘nepotism and spoils may very well be the potent stimuli needed by a powerful, rigid———Bureaucracy’.
21 Costikyan, E., ‘The Locus of Corruption’, in Gardiner, J. and Alson, D., Theft of the City, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1974, pp. 205–15Google Scholar, italics in original.
22 Killick, Tony, ‘Price Controls in Africa: The Ghanaian Experience’ in Journal of Modern African Studies, vol. 11, 1973, pp. 405–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
23 For a comparative account see Dowse, Robert. Modernisation in Ghana and the USSR (London, Routledge, 1969)Google Scholar.
24 See Nelson Kasfir, ‘Departicipation and Political Development in Black African Polities’, paper read to the 1973 IPSA conference; Hirschman, A. O., Exit, Voice and Loyalty, Harvard University Press, 1970 Google ScholarPubMed; Sigelman, L., ‘Do Modern Bureaucracies Dominate Underdeveloped Polities’, American Political Science Review, vol. LXVI, 1972, pp. 525–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
25 E. A. Brett, ‘Relations of Production: The State and the Ugandan Crisis’ P.S.A. conference, 1976. See also Waterbury, J. ‘Corruption, Political Stability and Development: Egypt and Morocco’ in Government and Opposition, Vol. 11, no. 4; pp. 426–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar, who shows that ‘planning in Egypt led to tne private sector [coming] to depend upon the vast flow of publicly disbursed funds for its survival’.
26 This approach also has the advantage that it focusses upon the related questions of the direction in which resources flow and whether or not such resources sustain something like LeVine’s informal polity.