POWER corrupts. So too does a resource-rich economy, like Nigeria’s, where easy access to oil revenues opens the door to palm-greasing. Of 168 countries surveyed by Transparency International, an anti-corruption group Germany, in its annual Corruption Perception Index, Nigeria ranks 32nd from the bottom.
Whistleblowers sometimes try to estimate how much cash has gone missing from Nigeria’s public purse. In 2014 a respected former central-bank governor lost his job after claiming that $20 billion had been stolen. But this captures only a small share of the damage done by corruption. The much bigger question is where Nigeria could be if its politicians and officials were a little more honest.
One answer comes from economists at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). They compared Nigeria to three other resource-producing countries that are somewhat less corrupt than it, though by no means squeaky clean: Ghana, Malaysia and Colombia. PwC concluded that Nigeria’s’s economy, which was worth $513 billion in 2014, might have been 22% bigger if its level of corruption were closer to Ghana’s, a nearby west African country.
By 2030, the...Continue reading
Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/1PPAOme
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