You do not talk about the C word because the institution s charter states you should not get involved in politics. You surely did not talk about press freedom, because press freedom was very close to politics. So our relations with the press, at the Bank, were characterized simply by press releases, and, I think, a measure of transparency in relation to your questions. What became very clear to me, after a year or two under this regime, was that the issue of corruption and the issue of press freedom, while they may have political impact, are in fact essential issues in terms of economic development. In fact, six months later, we had a meeting of the Development Committee, and every minister made a speech about corruption, even ministers from some countries that you might call corrupt, because they all wanted to espouse the belief, and their assertion, that corruption was in fact at the core of development.
Poor people get very angry when someone else is rich at their expense, when inequity raises itself.
So we launched into the issue of corruption, but we soon discovered that to attack the issue of corruption, you could not do it from Washington, or London, or Paris, simply stating that corruption is something that must be overcome if you are to have effective development. We discovered, of course, that in quite a number of countries payments for bribes were deductible for tax purposes, and given that that was true, and is still true today, though it is now in the process of being criminalized by recent OECD actions which are being imposed over three years, it was sort of hard to take a pompous and high-minded attitude when your companies were out there paying bribes and the government was paying half. So let me not suggest that corruption is the unique characteristic of developing countries. It is, I regret to say, known elsewhere as well. But what we certainly knew was, as we unleashed this debate on corruption, that the only way, really, to deal with it is from within a country.