Why corruption is worth studying

Tarek al-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi was a twenty-seven-year-old Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire on December 17, 2010, in protest at the confiscation of his wares following an accusation by officials that he was trading illegally and evading taxes. That street vendor's action started the fires of the Tunisian Revolution and then the wider Arab Spring, and he was instantly cast as a hero by the global anticorruption community – after all, then-President Zine El Abidine Ben was a typical corrupt leader with a wife who had built herself an unauthorized villa at the Carthage UNESCO heritage site. While the people who disassembled her villa with their bare hands could not have been asked to look at the situation objectively, perhaps the global anticorruption community should still try to do so.

The hero of the Tunisian Revolution was in fact avoiding taxes, like most small traders in poor countries all around the world. He saw himself as acting legitimately against a state that had done so little for him and his family, while President Ben Ali and his wife prospered. The state could have argued that since people such as Bouazizi had never paid taxes, there were insufficient public resources to offer them much in the way of education or healthcare. It might turn out that the money spent on Ben Ali's villa and other spoils was insufficient to provide healthcare and education for all those in need who were either not earning enough to pay taxes or considered it unnecessary to do so. In other words, beyond the paradigm of predator and victim – two parts with ideally cast actors in this particular circumstance – what seems to be the problem in the Tunisian situation is the absence of an agreed social contract between these actors, avoiding both corruption and tax evasion. Only such a contract would give development a chance.

Does such a social contract exist today, after Ben Ali's demise? Are other democracies in the world, more mature than the Tunisian one, doing better? Judging by the grass-roots protests in India, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Brazil, one gets the feeling that people are genuinely fed up with governments controlled by rent seekers trying to enhance crony capitalism and inequitable development.