Corruption, Economic Growth and Anti Corruption Policy: Lessons for Indonesia
The eradication of corruption has become a central plank of government
policy in Indonesia following the collapse of the New Order. The sharp
rise in civil society organisations and the free media that came with
the advent of the second wave of Indonesian democracy has raised public
awareness of the magnitude and the consequences of corruption on
Indonesia’s economic, social and political development. Perhaps no
other area of public policy generates more interest and concern that
the degree and the varieties of corruption that continue to exist in
Indonesia.
Despite the public interest and often repeated commitment by Government
to bring corruption under control there is much public scepticism about
the effectiveness of anticorruption policy. This is fuelled partly by
the inability to successfully prosecute high level government officials
who have been long suspected to have engaged in corruption at a very
high scale. It is also driven by international rankings on the
perception of corruption in business practices published by such
international civil society organisations as Transparency International
who rank Indonesia along with Bangladesh as one of the most corrupt
countries in the world.
This policy brief examines the design of Indonesian anti-corruption
policy. It argues that it is time to move beyond high profile “grand
strategies” for controlling corruption towards more sector driven micro
policies which will increase public engagement in overseeing
anticorruption measures. This is because there is little international
evidence of a link between corruption and economic growth at the macro
level as well as the fact that over time high profile anti-corruption
commissions have created more problems than they have solved. It is
time for a rethink and to evolve a more publicly credible government
stance on anticorruption policy by focussing on some of building blocks
of anti-corruption policy.
The
purpose of this paper is to identify the nature of these concerns and
to find mechanisms that the donor community could employ to respond
creatively to the challenges that are likely to emerge in this domain.
