Corruption is a disease, a cancer that eats into the cultural, political and

economic fabric of society, and destroys the functioning of vital organs. In the
words of Transparency International, “Corruption is one of the greatest challenges
of the contemporary world. It undermines good government, fundamentally distorts
public policy, leads to the misallocation of resources, harms the private sector
and private sector development and particularly hurts the poor. Corruption also
defined as 'the abuse of public power for personal ends' - has always existed.
During recent decades, however, it has grown both in terms of geographic extent
and intensity. Since the mid 1970s, it has infiltrated virtually every country in
the world. Corruption is found almost everywhere, it is deep rooted in many of the
newly industrialised countries, and it is reaching alarming proportions in several
of the post-communist countries. Corruption has been the subject of a substantial
amount of the o rising and empirical research over the last 30 years, and this has
produced a bewildering array of alternative explanations, typologies and remedies.
However, as an extensively applied notion in both politics and social sciences,
corruption is being used rather haphazardly. Corruption is understood as
everything from the paying of bribes to civil servants in return for some favour
and the theft of public purses, to a wide range of dubious economic and political
practices in which politicians and bureaucrats enrich themselves and any abusive
use of public power to a personal end. Besides, corruption is in itself a many-
faceted phenomenon and the concept of corruption contains too many connotations to
be analytically functional without a closer definition.
The main cause of occur corruption in Malaysia is government tend to earn more
money. Since the ultimate source of rent-seeking behavior is the availability of
rents, corruption is likely to occur where restrictions and government
intervention lead to the presence of such excessive profits. Examples include
trade restrictions (such as tariffs and import quotas), favoritist industrial
policies (such as subsidies and tax deductions), price controls, multiple exchange
rate practices and foreign exchange allocation schemes, and government-controlled
provision of credit. Some rents may arise in the absence of government
intervention, as in the case of natural resources, such as oil, whose supply is
limited by nature and whose extraction cost is far lower than its market price.
Since abnormal profits are available to those who extract oil, officials who
allocate extraction rights are likely to be offered bribes. Finally, one would
expect that corruption is more likely to take place when civil servants are paid
very low wages and often must resort to collecting bribes in order to feed their
families.
Nowadays we see corruption in every field of life. In our society there is no any
department which is totally free from corruption. Every affected person comments
that he does not like corruption and wants to remove the corruption from the
society. In order to remove the corruption from the society we should know the
causes of corruption. Whenever we don’t know the causes of corruption, we will not
finish this lame duck from our society. There are many causes of corruption, one
of the causes of corruption is poverty. Poverty is very common factor of
corruption. Poverty insists a poor man towards corruption. We all know that a poor
man lives from hand to mouth. In this modern age dearness is increasing day by
day. In order to fulfill his family demands, he does corruption. Mostly it has
been seen that rich people get benefited through poor. They pay a handsome amount
of money to the needy people for doing wrong deed.
Corruption produces a very bad effect on the society. It destroys the ethics and
the values of the society. Corruption makes the people to do every type of bad
thing. Due to corruption people do not perform their duty well. There are many
examples of corruptions lying in our society. We often see, when a common citizen
violate a law, police arrest him. But as he offers bribe to the officer, he
immediately release him after taking the bribe from him. This shows that the
police officer is corrupt and he not performing his duty well. Like wise our
courts are not fulfilling their duty in a well manner. If you have money, you can
make the judge take decision in your favor. In this way the innocent is punished
and the culprit released. Our politicians, doctors, engineers, journalists,
teacher etc are doing corruption in their fields. In these circumstances what do
you expect with our society? The answer is “just corruption”. When a common man
sees corruption in every field of life, he also makes himself a corrupt man.
Others effect of corruption in Malaysia is reduced public trust in
government increase vulnerability of the poor. Corruption that reduces governance
capacity also may inflict critical collateral damage: reduced public trust in
government institutions. A declines, research has shown that vulnerability of the
poor increases as their economic productivity is affected. The concept of social
capital refers to social structures that enable people to work collectively for
the good of the group.20 One of the most important and widely discussed elements
of social capital is trust, both interpersonal trust and trust in institutions of
governments trust -- an important element of social capital --Recent research on
social capital suggests that there is a relationship between corruption, trust and
poverty. The proposition is that corruption destroys people’s trust in government
and other institutions. This effect is most salient for the lowest income groups
and low social capital affects people’s willingness and ability to engage in
productive activity.
Corruption is an intractable problem. It is like diabetes, can only be
controlled, but not totally eliminated. It may not be possible to root out
corruption completely at all levels but it is possible to contain it within
tolerable limits. Honest and dedicated persons in public life, control over
electoral expenses could be the most important prescriptions to combat corruption.
Corruption has a corrosive impact on our economy. It worsens our image in
international market and leads to loss of overseas opportunities. Corruption is a
global problem that all countries of the world have to confront, solutions,
however, can only be home grown. We have tolerated corruption for so long. The
time has now come to root it out from its roots.