Romanian officials are easy to bribe

Romania ranks among Central and Eastern European states where officials’ benevolence can be easily bought by private companies, either for favourable laws or decisions, or for being granted profitable contracts, according to a study entitled “How profitable is to buy state officials within transition economies,” recently published by “Transitions” magazine.

In line with the study, Romania is, beside Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Moldova, the Russian Federation, Slovakia and Ukraine, among states with a high state “capturing” possibility.

State capturing is defined as the capacity to influence the basic rules of the game (laws, decrees, regulations) by corrupting officials. An index of state capturing can be built on the basis of companies’ answers related to the evaluation of forms of corruption with a direct impact over their own business: * Sale of MPs’ votes,* Sale of presidential decrees, * Fraudulent allocation of central bank funds, * Sale of justice decisions, * Party financing

According to this index, transition economies can be divided into economies with an easy-to-capture state and with a hard-to-capture state or into “high capture”-“low capture.”

The “low capture” group includes Albany, Armenia, Belarus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Poland, Slovenia and Uzbekistan. Obviously, this is a non-homogeneous group of states, as it includes the most and least reformist countries within the region, from both the economic and political points of view. The explanation is that in countries such as Belarus or Uzbekistan, where privatisation has reached only minimal levels, where the private sector is up-front and important elements of the command economy system have survived, the capacity of the private sector to capture the state is expected to be low (the concept itself may have little relevance in this context).