WORLD> Asia-Pacific
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WORLD> Asia-Pacific
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Tough graft battle in Southeast Asia despite campaigns
(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-12-16 20:28 Most Firms Experience Corruption A PricewaterhouseCoopers survey of senior executives around the world found two-thirds of them had experienced some form of actual or attempted corruption in their business dealings.
Almost 80 percent of the executives said their company has some form of anti-corruption programme, but only a fifth of them were very confident that it was working. More than half of the executives said in the August report "Confronting Corruption" that enforcement had increased over the last five years and would strengthen further in five years. Executives said they felt particularly vulnerable when doing business in emerging markets. "The search for new opportunities is increasingly taking companies into emerging markets ... where they confront unfamiliar business practices," the PricewaterhouseCoopers report says. "Being able to manage risk in new environments is a necessity as businesses compete globally." Transparency International's annual "Bribe Payers Index", released last week, found that firms from emerging economic giants such as India and Russia are seen to be routinely engaged in bribery when doing business abroad. Institutions in the region that were perceived to be most amenable to taking bribes were Indonesia's parliament, Malaysia's police, and Philippine customs agents. The record, then, is mixed across the region. Many countries appear to be cracking down on the routine bribes and kickbacks that have long characterised business dealings in Asia. Companies, for their part, no longer see these kinds of payments as a necessary evil for doing business. But systemic corruption, poor governance and lack of transparency continue to be significant issues. World Bank analysts Daniel Kaufman, Aart Kraay and Massimo Mastruzzi concluded in a recent study: "We certainly do not have any evidence of any significant improvement in governance worldwide, and if anything the evidence is suggestive of a deterioration, at the very least, in key dimensions such as regulatory quality, rule of law, and control of corruption." The massive growth of international trade and globalisation over the past two decades has greatly expanded opportunities for corruption, as well, and has brought new players into the fray such as multinational firms from India with different business cultures from that of the West. "Through globalisation, competition has increased, and so has competitive corruption." Transparency International Malaysia President Ramon Navaratnam noted in an interview. "All is fair in love and war and business and so you have incentives for corruption."
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