Understanding and Eradicating Corruption Fundamentally
Kimberly Ann Elliott, in her writing ‘The Problem of Corruption: A Tale of Two Countries’ published in the Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business (1997), posits that while corruption has long been part of human life, it has only recently become a critical issue in international attention and public policy debate.
Corruption does not only pose problems for the country where it occurs, but also burdens society through economic stagnation, limitations in physical and social infrastructure, and the ineffectiveness of political systems. Furthermore, widespread corruption that hinders economic development and political stability can evolve into a threat to international peace and prosperity.
Corruption can also facilitate drug trafficking, money laundering, and other transnational crimes, while distorting international trade and investment flows. In this context, multinational corporations contribute when they use bribes or specific advantages to obtain or maintain business interests in other countries.
Kimberly’s thoughts provide an important entry point to understanding that corruption cannot always be explained solely as an individual act driven by greed or self-interest. In its development, corruption can involve organisations, including corporations, which possess complex structures, economic resources, business relationships, and decision-making mechanisms.
In such conditions, corruption can be used as part of an effort to gain profit, maintain economic interests, win competition, or influence decision-making processes. Therefore, the more complex the economic structures and activities surrounding a corrupt act, the more complex the ways in which that corruption is carried out, hidden, and enjoyed.
This perspective leads us to the understanding that the eradication of corruption crimes should not merely be directed at the individuals who directly commit or receive bribes. Attention must also be paid to structures, power relations, economic interests, decision-making patterns, and the use of legal entities or corporations that can create space, facilitate, or even serve as a medium for corruption to occur.
Thus, understanding corruption means not only understanding who does it, but also how it happens, through what structures it is conducted, for whose benefit, and how the proceeds of the crime are hidden and enjoyed. This broader understanding is a vital prerequisite for formulating anti-corruption strategies capable of keeping pace with the evolving forms and modes of modern corruption.
Therefore, if corruption is viewed merely as an individual moral issue—because the perpetrator is greedy, dishonest, or unafraid of the law—it becomes difficult to explain why corruption can persist massively, repeatedly, involving many actors, and continue to emerge despite ongoing law enforcement.
Such a viewpoint tends to place the source of the problem solely on the perpetrator, whereas corruption often grows in environments that provide structures of opportunity, economic incentives, weak oversight, conflicts of interest, and power relations that allow such acts to occur and flourish.
Consequently, understanding corruption fundamentally requires us to view it not just as a matter of individual behaviour, but as a multidimensional phenomenon that is the intersection of individual, institutional, political, economic, and the culture of power.
It is from this starting point that anti-corruption efforts must move: not only by punishing those who have committed corruption, but also by fixing the structures that allow corruption to occur from the outset.
One of the most important roots is that a person commits corruption when, in their calculation, the benefits of corruption and the potential costs of being caught and punished—which include not just imprisonment, but also the potential loss of position, reputation, wealth, and power networks—do not outweigh the gains.
The problem is, if the possibility of being caught can be negotiated, the punishment is disproportionate to the profit, and the proceeds of the crime can still be enjoyed by the perpetrator’s family or network, then corruption becomes ‘economically rational behaviour’—an action by an individual or party based on a cost-benefit analysis to achieve the greatest possible benefit with the considered risks.
The profits from corruption are often far greater than the losses suffered by the perpetrator. Imagine someone gains Rp100 billion through corruption; if only a small portion of the assets is seized and some money is returned, but wealth remains that can be enjoyed through family, nominees, companies, or hidden assets, then the ‘expected benefit’—the anticipated profit from a corrupt act—remains very high.
In this context, the issue is not merely ‘How many years is the perpetrator imprisoned?’ but rather, ‘After the entire legal process is complete, does corruption still provide a profit to the perpetrator?’ If the answer is still yes, then the legal system has not yet fully eliminated the economic incentive to corrupt.
As it evolves, corruption is no longer just an individual crime, but can become a networked crime. Large-scale corruption rarely stands alone; instead, it can involve officials, entrepreneurs or corporations, intermediaries, nominee accounts, assets, and money laundering.