It's late at night, you're heading to your car parked in the garage. On the floor next to the car you find a white envelope. You pick it up and open it: inside you will find twenty bills of one hundred dollars each. No one has seen you nor are there any cameras that could have filmed you. What do you do with the envelope? Do you hand it over to the police, decide to keep the money, or are you unsure and decide to think about it until the next day? 50% of subjects to whom the World Bank administered this test in February 2006 said they would think about what to do until the next day; 33% declared that they would have given the envelope to those responsible and the remaining 17% confessed that, under the aforementioned conditions (ie the impossibility of being discovered), they would have kept the money with them. Let's imagine that conditions change: now there is a small probability (exactly 30%) that a camera, in charge of monitoring the security of the garage, may have filmed you as you collect the envelope. How do the results change? 74% of respondents said they would, without a doubt, hand the envelope to the police; 22% are undecided and only 4% confessed that, despite the risk, they would take possession of the money.
An easy game about corruption with which Dr. Francesca Recanatini (economist of the World Bank) explained how decisive it is, in contexts where the actors are attracted by the hypothesis of corruption, to introduce a control system. "In the first case, 17% of the subjects decide to indulge in corruptive actions - said Recanatini - while in the second scenario, when there is a risk of being discovered, only 4% of them decide to take the risk and take the money . The introduction of control systems decisively changes the behavior of the agents”.
The World Bank economist was one of the speakers at the seminar organized by the Higher School of Public Administration ("The prevention of corruption, comparing practices") which was held today in the multipurpose room of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers in Rome. Among the speeches, that of Minister for Public Administration Filippo Patroni Griffi, who reiterated how important the role of the public apparatus is in the fight against corruption. “The approval of the implementing decrees of the anti-corruption law is going ahead – said the Minister – following the logic that accompanies us in this battle: that of prevention and repression”.
According to the latest ranking drawn up by Transparency International (a non-governmental organization that deals with corruption), Italy is in 72nd place among the least transparent countries. In the previous ranking, we were in 69th place. Even Lesotho and Rwanda are better than us. On 14 February, Transparency International published a "memo for Italy" and, on its website, included the recent statements by Silvio Berlusconi who - commenting on the matter of bribes by Finmeccanica in India - said: "Bribes are a phenomenon that exists and it is useless to deny the existence of these necessary situations. These are not crimes. We're talking about paying a commission to someone in that country. Because these are the rules in that country."
