retail corruption

Medusa, beautiful maiden until she was raped by Poseidon which caused her hair to turn into snakes and anyone who looked at her turned to stone. She dies when Perseus cuts off her head and from her neck springs Pegasus, the white winged steed. A very brief account of this part of Greek mythology as an introduction to a topic that is always present in national life, a disease that overwhelms us, paralyzing snakes that undermine the social fabric with their venom.

Corruption is a poison that corrodes institutions and acts like a tax that inhibits development and generates a high social cost; It causes, by itself, that the level of wealth, income and individual and social well-being is lower than if this phenomenon did not exist. Governments have come and gone and all have promised to lead a frontal fight against them and all have, to a greater or lesser extent, failed. Corruption is still there, entrenched.

Like previous governments, that of President López is no exception, but he is the only one who, contrary to all the evidence of acts of corruption in his own government, has dared to affirm repeatedly that it is over. Since the beginning of his government, he has taken out a white handkerchief 45 times, which he takes out of his pocket every time there is news or a corruption scandal in his government. Each time the handkerchief has to be a new one because it gets so dirty that it is impossible to wash it.

Corruption is so persistent that Transparency International, in its report this year, assigned Mexico a score of 31/100 in the Corruption Perception Index, placing it in 124th place out of 180 countries evaluated. On the other hand, a survey carried out by Mexicans against Corruption and Impunity showed that 80% of those surveyed have the perception that acts of corruption are frequently committed.

As we know, corruption takes different forms: direct allocations of the public budget to companies of friends, public resources channeled to shell companies, moches to access a public works contract or to be a provider of a good or service to a government entity, bribes to the tax authority to avoid an audit and/or pay less taxes and a long etcetera.

One of the forms that corruption takes, one of Medusa’s snakes, is what we can call retail corruption and that results from the interaction of private economic agents (individuals and companies) with different government instances. According to the National Survey of Government Impact and Quality, 57% of the population considered the prevalence of corruption in their federal entity as one of the most important problems, only below public insecurity and 14.7% of individuals older than 18 years were victims of an act of corruption when carrying out procedures or requesting a public service.

Retail corruption normally derives from excessive and inefficient regulation that allows the bureaucrats who administer it to act as rent seekers and extort private economic agents in order to appropriate a part of the national income greater than their own. contribution to generate it; a rent. Obviously, individuals who have to bribe to carry out procedures lose, since those same resources could have been used to acquire consumer goods and satisfy some need within the home and companies to invest more. The big loser is society as a whole because corruption is a negative sum game.

The incidence of retail corruption by type of procedure was: permits related to property (22.3%), procedures to open a company (21.9%), municipal procedures that include connection to the drinking water and drainage networks (13.8%) , vehicle procedures (11.1%), municipal services (10%) and electrical energy service procedures by the CFE (7.4%).

This kind of corruption is not going away because there is no Perseus cutting off Medusa’s head; Lopez is not. What is required is to have a more efficient, transparent regulation without discretionary application in a democratic environment with accountability. If the governors and municipal authorities wanted greater prosperity for their entities and municipalities, that is what they would have to do. Unfortunately, it cannot be ruled out, because historical evidence indicates so, that they still prefer to act as rent extractors even if they harm their population, so Pegasus will not fly.

Twitter: @econoclasta