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cronies. Truman, whose motto as President was ‘the buck stops here’, had no hesitancy in making a decision. He traded off his official obligation to award contracts through value-for-money procedures in order to help people in his district get the paved roads that they needed (https:// www.nps.gov/nr/twhp/wwwlps/lessons/103truman/103facts2.htm). The challenge of making trade-offs between respect for anti-corruption laws and getting things done is not confined to government departments. Multinational firms engaged in capital-intensive activities in countries with corrupt governance can face demands from public officials for bribes as a condition of doing business there. Enterprises that have invested large sums in developing economic resources, such as oil and mining companies, have historically traded off the cost of a bribe for the mutual benefit of their first-world shareholders and corrupt third-world officials. Within countries where good governance is lacking, individuals face a dilemma. Even if they think services ought to be delivered by the book, if the consequence is to deprive themselves or a family member of prompt hospital treatment, they are prepared to set aside their normative values to get what they want by hook or by crook.
2 Targeting Vulnerable Services The diagnosis of corruption usually focuses on characteristics that are pervasive throughout the body politic as a whole. This approach is encouraged by the indexes of Transparency International and the World Bank rating countries as a whole. Macroeconomists concerned with the effects of corruption on the national economy and professors of public administration who focus on the administration of national government reinforce this tendency. In consequence, prescriptions for reducing corruption normally do not take into account differences between public services. When individuals and corporations pay bribes they are not paid for public services as a whole; financing government in general is done through the payment of taxes. Bribes are paid to obtain a specific public service and services differ in what is delivered and how their delivery may be vulnerable to corruption. Public services delivered to individuals at the grass roots are vulnerable to bribes being paid far out of sight of policymakers in the national capital. By contrast, capital-intensive services are delivered by decisions about contracts made by high-level policymakers.
