What are the most common problems that countries face in fighting corruption?
Hansjörg Elshorst : I am a founding member of Transparency International (TI), and we “invented” transparency. I have also been the head of TI in Germany during the past five years. I do not necessarily have a general overview of problems that countries face with fighting corruption, and, generally speaking, this is a very difficult question to answer. My feeling is that problems vary in different parts of the world. But there is one common thing: corruption–in the beginning, before you really focus on it–is not considered a problem, like is the case of Germany and other industrialized countries. People think corruption is not present in their political or economic systems until they actually learn that they are wrong. Another common phenomenon is that corruption is taken as something normal, something you would not have to worry about because everybody knows and everybody does it. Thus, the difficulties of identifying corruption as a problem are the first common obstacles. In my und
