I bet Haiti (bottom of the list) would love to have only 50% of its public officers be corrupt! It's all a matter of perspective.
I wasn't talking about public officers. As far as I know, they may well all be corrupt. I was referring to things like the minister commissioning a purchase from his own brother-in-law at double market prices, getting caught, and.. nothing happens. Or another minister running a lot of funds from the ministry into his own company, getting accused of it by a fellow party minister on opposition TV.. and both ministers stay in the government. I'm not saying this second minister is honest. He probably just tried to use the situation to get himself into a better position when his party is defeated by the opposition in the next elections. Everyone knows they will. Everyone knows the reason is corruption, corruption, and corruption. The few independent voices remind that the opposition really weren't any better back when they were in power.. possibly even worse.
Or were for public show. Chances are he merely replaced previous government's cronies with his own, as is typical in Latin America, and particularly prevalent in nations following a cult of personality.
I don't think so. In this case we should probably more look towards what happened in Brazil recently, or in India during Rajiv Gandhi in the 80's. Chavez isn't really the kind who puts the funds to his private account. But like what happened in Brazil and India, there is always a risk that he and his party might try to siphon public funds into the party.
I doubt you'll find allegations that the head of the State itself is corrupt.
Hey, that happens every day here. On a good day, even some of his ministers may deliver the allegation.. and still stay in the government.
Heck, until Daniel Ortega made his ill-fated trip to the UN and was caught spending thousands of dollars of his impoverished nation's money on designer sunglasses and jackets, he was considered the next great reformer of Nicaragua!
That's just muddling the waters. Ortega has thousands of dollars? Funny, nobody complains when company CEOs or even NGO staff gets decent pay while working in these countries. I know Morales thought it was a good propaganda stunt to cut his own monthly wage to $1700. But really, reasonably high wages for government officials is not corruption. In fact, it's a way to stifle corruption. Well-paid - within reason - government workers are more likely to stay on the right side of the law.
The problem isn't Chavez taking bribes or skimming the Treasury. The problem is a culture of corruption throughout the government that Chavez either is unable to eliminate or unwilling.
I completely agree. The problem here in Belize is more of the first kind, however. That's why I'd be much more suspicious towards major government takeovers here, than I am about Chavez' propositions.
In theory that may be true, but Venezuela clearly has a corruption problem. The regular incentives don't appear to be functioning there. Replacing corporate governance with corrupt governance seems a step back, at a minimum until Venezuela shows progress in fighting corruption.
Chavez obviously argues that he fights corruption precisely by replacing a corrupt corporate governance with a straight government governance. The latter part can well be questioned, but I do not doubt that Venezuelan oil is highly corrupt today.
Corporations' only incentives are to its board and its shareholders, and those incentives encourage it to cut waste and boost profits.
But we have a monopoly here. If you call it profits or corruption doesn't matter much here - the money is lost either way. Of course, because it is a monopoly, there is already government regulation to make sure that some of that profit goes to the state. But to avoid that, the board, shareholders, and directors have a very high incentive indeed to siphon funds away from this heavy taxation.
The State's incentives are also to maximize employment and payroll, which discourages the laying off of inefficient workers.
In these instances I very much doubt this is very relevant. Besides, it would surely make more sense to transfer inefficient workers to somewhere where they can make themselves useful, than to lay them off.
But who ensures these books are accurate? The government.
The opposition and the press.
There's a reason companies are required to have independent auditors and why it's a big scandal when the auditors fail (ala Arthur Andersen).
I think you have a somewhat naive US perspective here. The US has
excellent laws on corporate accountability compared to probably every other nation in the world. I would be surprised if Venezuelan companies are required to have independent auditors, in a meaningful sense of that word. Heck, I don't think that system is credible in Sweden, even. I'd love to have the US regulation on this matter.
Venezuela's political opposition is very weak. And given that the government will control access to the books of the company, the press' ability to monitor government finances is limited.
Venezuela's political opposition is clearly
very well funded. They have a number of TV stations at their disposal. You're assuming that the Venezuelan government would keep the books secret, which is of course
possible, but that would be
very remarkable indeed. If that happens, sign me up with the anti-Chavez league.
According to
Reporters Without Borders, which monitors press freedoms, Venezuela ranks 90th out of 167 nations, tied with places like Cambodia and Qatar. Not an auspicious record.
That's because they have an awful lot of people getting killed. Not on orders from the administration, but by corrupt policemen and rampant general violence. It's been like this for ages, but it's arguably another failure of the Chavez administration that it continues.
(Sweden is 12th and Belize didn't appear on the list.)
Oh, we have a very free press. 50% of the print press is controlled by either of the political parties, which means they both have one newspaper. That's Belize, not Sweden, by the way.
How refereshing, complete with a closing ad hom. 