LIBERALIZATION AND CORRUPTION - RESOLVING THE PARADOX (A DISCUSSION BASED ON SOUTH INDIAN MATERIAL)

Theoretical treatments of corruption in the new political economy plac e bureaucrats who control public sector goods centre stage. Corrupt be haviour then involves the creation of new private property rights over such goods, and deregulation and privatization will then destroy the preconditions for corruption. Here, empirical material from South Indi a is used in a political economy framework to show how such theories r epresent an arbitrary and highly ideologically filtered subset of rela tions of corruption. Alternatives are described in which the process o f accumulation through market exchange, rather than the rent seeking o f the bureaucrat, is centre stage. Further, under conditions where the purposes of corruption are not merely private bureaucratic gain but a lso bidding for political power, then the predictions of new political economy can be up-ended and corruption can be seen to increase conseq uent to deregulation.