FROM THE EDITOR
Dr. Emzar Djgerenaia
World economy is seized with serious crisis and oh, wonder, the reason of it is corruption. Each foreign delegation that comes to Georgia sharply criticises rampant corruption in our country and calls it a source of all our misfortunes.
They criticise Georgia ? the country with budget less than half a billion dollars and with its business being of consumer type as compared with world economic activity. As for the rest of the world, there is a real corruption there!
“WorldCom” alone boosted its assets by 80 billion dollars. This figure equals budget of Georgia for 160 years. What does this mean in human language: the company did not make it “for show”, but rather cheated investors i.e. simply speaking, people, millions of teachers, pensioners, etc. in the whole world who invested their savings in the company in order to keep their families and receive worthy pensions, but at what price? The company boosted its incomes in order to increase price of shares and sell shares at four dollars, i.e. those who bought 10 thousands’ worth shares have paid 40 thousands for them. This means that “WorldCom” earned 60 billion dollars through this machination. Opponents may say – Where is corruption here? The matter is that this and other companies would not be able to make this operation if the State Commission and other controlling state agencies would not shut their eyes to such machinations. The reader, probably, knows what makes them condone such machinations. If it were only “WorldCom”, we would not pay our attention to it, but such facts have already grown into a tendency. The history of Enron and other latest events are a clear example of it. Thus, the USA should be thankful to corruption for the business boom of the 90 ieth. It turns out that corruption stimulates business. Nowadays, world economy goes through its hardest days ? business indices of all developed countries have fallen catastrophically for the whole length of July. From May to the end of July Dow Jones fell from 10400 to 7600 points. “Nasdaq” (high technologies stock) fell from 1750 to 1200 points. This was followed by crisis in Europe where Dux “Germany” has fallen from 5075 to 3500 points during the same period not to mention crisis in Asian markets. Subsequently, there was an unseen fall of dollar against Euro that collapsed due to the corruption in the world. Yet, specialists forecast that it is only a beginning as many other facts of corruption are to be discovered yet. Then you should see what would happen! Added to this will be a scandal in the Euro Commission concerning the same corruption that, according to specialists, would be even greater that that of the last century.
It seems there is no way out as we, Georgians, thought that corruption was a disease of our young Georgian states. However, it turned out that corruption seems to be a necessary condition for the development of business. No, you will not be able to read this in books of Machew and Samuel, but what we have seen from world practice, is, certainly, resentful. Yet, why should the Georgians lag behind the world practice in this field? Missionaries visiting Georgia assert that we are the most corrupted in the world. We believed in it and even turned red with shame for resembling inhabitants of the North America not only in colour, but also in level of corruption.
It means in Georgian that one can never see a beam of wood in other people’s eyes.
Yet, it would not be a bad thing to give a leave to our institutions and anti-corruption organs in summer at the expense of grants and send them not to Kobuleti, but California to help put out the fires.
We would be glad to speak to our reader on a more pleasant subject during summer holidays, but it is not time for summer with world economy being in a slump.