13 quotes
Payments made to, or extorted by, a corrupt bureaucracy can enable a socially chaotic system to function.
Bribery and Extortion in World Business with Peter Nehemkis and Richard Eells (1977)
Markets work most efficiently and the economy of a country develops best when the price and merits of products and services are the criteria that determine buying and selling—not secret payments to well-placed politicians and government employees.
Bribery and Extortion in World Business with Peter Nehemkis and Richard Eells (1977)
Political payments by multinational companies in foreign nations have long been a pervasive practice; but a cultural taboo against discussion of the subject, combined with a lack of public information, has created a vacuum in public understanding.
Bribery and Extortion in World Business with Peter Nehemkis and Richard Eells (1977)
Internal corruption grows out of the very nature of the communist economies—chronic shortages of consumer goods, their poor quality, the interminable delays in obtaining service and repairs, a centralized planning system that decides what people should wear or consume, whether they like the product or not.
Bribery and Extortion in World Business with Peter Nehemkis and Richard Eells (1977)
Communist propagandists have long maintained that capitalism is the breeding ground of corruption. One would, therefore, expect to find in the communist orbit a ‘new man’ who has no appetite for the decadent bourgeois habits of the West. But fact as distinguished from myth reveals that corrupt practices abound in the communist nations.
Bribery and Extortion in World Business with Peter Nehemkis and Richard Eells (1977)
In many foreign nations, especially those in the Third World, political and social evolution has been such as to produce a monolithic state that lacks any clear division between a public and a private sector. Indeed, throughout much of the world today, official political ideology is hostile to the concepts of the private-enterprise market economy.
Bribery and Extortion in World Business with Peter Nehemkis and Richard Eells (1977)
Because conduct judged improper or illegal in one culture may be considered quite proper—even unavoidable—in other cultures, we have been chary of making moral judgments. Thus, we have sought to avoid the twin pitfalls of arrogant ethnocentrism and moral absolutism.
Bribery and Extortion in World Business with Peter Nehemkis and Richard Eells (1977)
While it is true that not everyone in such a country will agree that this is the best way to run the government’s ‘civil service,’ by and large one has to conclude that a system of petty extortion and bribery has become entrenched over time simply because the country and its people have decided that they want it that way.
Bribery and Extortion in World Business with Peter Nehemkis and Richard Eells (1977)
It would be virtually impossible to obtain proof outside the United States that foreign companies were making payments to officials of foreign governments to assist them in obtaining business. American companies may engage in mea culpa breastbeating in this country, but it is not a popular addiction abroad.
Bribery and Extortion in World Business with Peter Nehemkis and Richard Eells (1977)
In consequence, the civil services of many Third World nations operate as feudal baronies, exploiting those with whom they deal. In the absence of institutions or organized groups capable of restraining official venality, the employees and officials of these bureaucracies possess virtually untrammeled power for obtaining personal wealth.
Bribery and Extortion in World Business with Peter Nehemkis and Richard Eells (1977)
The public has come to suspect that bribery of high foreign political figures by American companies is rampant. Yet the number of proven cases of bribery involving misconduct by high officials of foreign governments is very small. And many instances of misconduct are more extortion than bribery. The truth, however, is always hard to discover because of the clandestine nature of the transactions.
Bribery and Extortion in World Business with Peter Nehemkis and Richard Eells (1977)
State ownership of, and control over, much of the means of production has been an essential part of Middle Eastern economies. Unlike Europe, the Middle East did not produce a politically and economically influential bourgeoisie that could act as a countervailing power to the state and its rulers.
Bribery and Extortion in World Business with Peter Nehemkis and Richard Eells (1977)
Because internal corruption is endemic to the communist system, it ineluctably conditions privileged elite to the habits of corruption in their external relations with other communist officials in the Eastern bloc countries and with the Western and Japanese businessmen who negotiate with the state enterprises.
Bribery and Extortion in World Business with Peter Nehemkis and Richard Eells (1977)