The Hong Kong-based Political and Economic Risk Consultancy ranked Taiwan lower (more corrupt) than China in a recent corruption report. President Ma Ying-jeou is spinning this as a DPP era problem, and calling for action to clean up "major" scandals.
But since the ranking results are based on a survey of foreign business executives, most of the corruption being talked about would be low level corruption that the business executives deal with when opening a company, dealing with regulations, taxes or officials, etc.
Ma is proposing the wrong remedy for the malady-- a set of laws that are designed to facilitate corruption (political donation laws that ask politicians to report spending but not receipts, a lack of transparency in politicians income, a legislature which won't take back salary of unqualified legislators who stole their salaries, etc). These laws work hand-in-hand with a low level political culture which expects corruption.
If Taiwan wants to improve its ranking on the corruption index, it will have to do much more than have a set of "investigations" of "major" corruption scandals.
It seems that this "publication" arrived just on time, justifying the press conference of Ma.
ReplyDeleteA publication from Hong Kong...
Beside, the Asian Development Bank and Transparency International (which are much more public, open and well-known) published something quite different...
I compared both, quite interesting...
Still, the question is the timing of the Hong Kong report...
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