2020-03-03
42 分钟Welcome to LSE IQ.
I'm Jess Winterstein and this is the podcast where we ask leading social scientists and other experts to answer an intelligent question.
Bribery, extortion, cronyism, nepotism, influence peddling, embezzlement.
Corruption comes in many forms and with varying levels of legality.
According to the Global NGO Transparency International, illicit financial flows including bribery,
theft and tax evasion cost developing countries more than 1.26 trillion US dollars per year.
The EU Commissioner for Home Affairs has estimated
that its member states alone lose 120 billion euros to corruption annually.
Corruption might have the greatest impact on the world's poorest countries but it is a universal problem that in some way or other touches us all.
In this episode I explore the question is corruption inevitable?
Right now we know that the biggest disease of all is not a disease, it's corruption.
But there's a vaccine for that too.
It's called transparency, open data sets.
This is a delicate thing to say to a group of leaders in their house of parliament but you have to fight the cancer of corruption.
Corruption destroys a country, it destroys state institutions, it destroys money,
the human development because money meant for human beings ends up in people's pockets,
it causes money laundering which puts pressure on your currency which devalues, which means inflation.
So I came to fight against corruption.
A disease, a cancer, a destroyer of countries.
From rock stars to world leaders the general consensus is that corruption is disastrous causing great damage to a nation's economic prosperity and its reputation.