Final Essay. Corruption in Large Infrastructure Projects: Australia and Sudan

Corruption in Large Infrastructure Projects: Australia and Sudan
Your Name
Subject and Section
Date
Political corruption is observed when a government official misappropriates their public office's power and networks to delegate authority to others in exchange for an illegitimate increase of wealth for private use (Locatelli, Mariani, Sainati, & Greco, 2017; Owusu, Chan, & Shan, 2017). In improving the economic growth of a country, corruption in public policies significantly affects the rate on which a country will improve its quality of life; therefore, locating the source of corruption and eradicating it are some of the primary objectives that different governments are trying to achieve (Locatelli et al., 2017).
However, the people should recognize first the different faces of corruption before anyone can learn how to combat its effects. Philp (2002), pointed out different faces of corruption depending of the type of gain that the public official will receive. In political corruption, the most common form is bribery where a politician accepts any individual or organization’s material inducement for a special favor in securing a certain result outside the due process (Philp, 2002). This is especially evident when it comes to the procurement of construction management in large infrastructure projects (Owusu, Chan, & Shan, 2017).
According to Owusu, Chan, & Shan (2017), corruption in infrastructure projects is observed when a public official gives favor to a certain organization or construction company in exchange for the contract of a construction project. Additionally, the corruption in the construction industry is prevalent since they can easily mask money laundering, bid rigging and other evolutions of corrupt acts, which can have a detrimental effect to the construction project, such as the decrease of building quality, due to the loss of budget, that reduce the lifespan of infrastructures (Owusu, Chan, & Shan, 2017).
In the study of Locatelli et al. (2017), they observed a relationship between the corruption and infrastructure project performance depending on the location of the construction site. It is mainly due to the fact that the bending of the rules is dependent on the physical locations that is highly controlled by corrupt officials where they can either or both: unlawfully qualify a certain bidder for the procurement of a construction project, and raise or reduce the engineering quality of the infrastructure materials and man-power during the construction timeframe (Locatelli et al., 2017).
Corruption in the construction industry is common around the world, the citizens of different nations view corruption with cultural relativism that has varied acceptance and rejection of corruption depending on the type (Murray & Zagaretos, 2001 as cited in Brown & Loosemore, 2015). In Australia, the building and construction industry is one of the main contributors of its national economy and welfare since large quantities of wealth is related with the economy of a developed country, Australia had experienced its own contribution in corrupt practices in large infrastructure projects through the years and try to eradicate corruption in construction (Hartley, 2009).
In other ...