Our colleague, head of the M&E department Anastasiia Mazurok, regularly publishes reviews of social studies on her Facebook page. Here is one about corruption.
Of course, I couldn’t leave out the subject of corruption. Though, you would think, maybe it’s not that obvious, given how Ukrainians will probably soon be allergic to this very word. Any failure, problem or reasoning behind reforms can be put down to this phenomenon.
But this will not be about corruption among officials, and not about corruption in the high ranks. Today, we will be talking about corruption in our everyday life.
During 11 years (between 2007 and 2018), the share of people who personally encountered corruption or had family members who personally encountered corruption reduced by 25%: from 67% to 42%.
During the past five years, the share of people who believe a bribe is justifiable when a personally important issue is at stake has reduced from 37% to 13%. These data indirectly attest to the fact that people are tolerating corruption less.
However, no more than 12.5% Ukrainians claim they are ready to take any anti-corruption action, even something as minimal as report it to the media, and only 4% actually do it. 6% to 9% are ready to take other action, but only about 2% do it.
What does it mean?
Even though corruption as a problem permeates most aspects of life, even though you hear about it from everywhere, even though when you hear corruption you think about high-ranking corruption first, in real life, Ukrainians actually see positive change.
Often, this change is not due to their own effort, but because of civil society organizations, local and national authorities, law enforcement agencies, reform implementation etc.
Of course, there are still numerous problems which I haven’t mentioned here, but I would rather not focus on fails right now.
