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Generally American corporations have spread to everywhere they are allowed.
Poor countries often have more rules and operating a legal business without bribing a bunch of people is impossible. International corporations are unwilling to cross that line for good reasons.
I feel that calling corruption incompetence is disingenuous. Most European nations were equally impossible to operate in legally a few centuries ago. That's just how poor economies and politics tend to mingle.
Hell, even some places they weren't allowed!
This doesn't seem accurate if you exclude the Eastern European states.
Corruption in the U.K., France, and Germany was/is generally carried out by non-state actors. Organized Crime, Mafia, and maybe international corporations. I'll certainly grant Italy is up there. And I think the BIG sign you're in a true Kleptocrat state is if your military is taking bribes and/or selling equipment on the side, which I do not believe is happening in Western European nations.
Scandinavia as a whole has no reputation for corruption that I'm aware of.
The prevalence of corruption of State actors themselves seems more common in Russia and the Post-Soviet states, any given Middle Eastern or African Country you could name, And Central and parts of South America. I'm excluding Mexico because that whole situation is 'complicated' by the existence and influence of powerful Cartels.
At the very least, 'civilized' countries have formalized the process for bribing the government so its mostly done in plain sight and with an air of plausible deniability. That said, individual cities/local governments in the U.S. Certainly read third-worldy in their approach to graft. I wasn't aware of it being common practice to bribe cops even in Chicago but a quick Google search turned up this recent story lol.
So maybe the correlation between corruption and competence can be seen in how 'naked' the bribes and graft are or if there are robust detection and enforcement mechanisms that aren't themselves hopeless compromised.
This is not, by Latin American standards, particularly unique. Thé much poorer golden triangle countries south of there are(or, in the case of El Salvador, we’re up until recently) even worse. Columbia and Ecuador certainly have extreme problems of their own with the same thing. And some of the Caribbean nations are just as bad. Brazil also has a problem with it, although granted everything I’ve heard about it is that Eastern Europe style bribery is also common there.
We know about Mexico’s problems with the cartels because it’s huge and nearby. Something like a quarter of thé world’s Spanish speakers live in Mexico, it’s the standard dialect, it’s relatively wealthy(by Latin American standards), it borders America, etc.
Right, the thing that stands out to me is that the Cartels very actively prevent the government from ever becoming less corrupt by literally murdering anyone they can't buy out before they can attain public office. Back before reddit banned /r/narcofootage it was actually crazy to see vids of Drug Kingpins rolling around in massively up-armored pickup trucks with gold-plated AK-47s. They get away with absolutely absurd amounts of violence on a daily basis, and while individual acts don't get punished, most of 'em eventually get got in the end. Except El Mencho.
So one can correctly say that the Cartels as a whole are a "parallel" sovereign occupying the same territory. Which isn't really true of anywhere else that I'm aware of. The primary government isn't really able to oust this force, unless they get outside help. Now, if they did get outside help, and they committed to it fully to the extent that El Salvador did, I bet they make good progress.
Notable, on the topic of European corruption, that is how Fascist Italy broke the Mafia for a period of time, which might have led to the strengthening of the Italian Mob in the U.S. thanks to displacing the leadership.
Russia seems to have fully intertwined its organized crime with its state apparatus.
The U.S. at large seems to have managed to keep its violent criminal element from comingling too much with its political class, AND has relatively low levels of "Politician being handed cartoonishly large bags of money in secret" type of corruption. I'll grant "insider trading out the wazoo" is a factor, of course. MAYBE that's a distinction without a difference. Of course, in my local area, the Sheriff got hit with a Federal Investigation for literally taking a cash handout. And he's Italian (his name is CARMINE MARCENO), so maybe its just a culture inclination.
Also, our politicians do seem to have a weakness for sexy foreign agents.
Lots of other examples in Latin America, lots of ideologically driven examples in the Middle East.
Where in the Middle East, at this point?
The Taliban 'officially" controls Afghanistan, ISIS doesn't have much territory to speak of, the Petrostates are pretty much uncontested in their borders. I guess Syria is still chunked up after the rebels actually got Assad to leave.
Syria, Libya, Kurdistan. The taliban might be the official government of Afghanistan but they do not have full territorial control.
Sudan is in a civil war, but it didn’t have full control of its territory before that.
Just a nitpick, but since when has northern Africa been considered part of "the Middle East"?
Always? It’s part of the former Ottoman Empire, part of the ‘Arab World’, part of the “MENA” demographic and geographic category which is widely used, and closely genetically, culturally and religiously related for thousands of years.
‘East’ is obviously dubious if you’re in Germany and we’re talking about Morocco, but the orient and occident were long more than just geographic designations.
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