Konstantin Sonin: "Price of corruption"

“Thank God that the“ Ivan Golunov Case ”on charges of a journalist -investigator, falsified by the power authorities, was discontinued three days later - as it should have. And even faster. The complex car of the Russian state worked - as it periodically did in tense situations. Not as it should work in normal circumstances, but just so that once again we wish you to say” the government “The only European,” the economist writes on his Facebook page.

“That's what a detail I would like, as an economist, to note. Very often, when they talk about the“ price of corruption ”, they talk about the volume of bribes paid by someone and someone received.

But the volume of bribes is nonsense, spit compared to how much corruption costs the economy. In this episode, the price of the fact that the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the FSB were corrupt generals and colonels - these are three days of life of tens of thousands of people, who, instead of doing, creating, developing, worried, worried about the journalist.

This is the time and strength spent by dozens of editions, that is, hundreds of journalists. This is the time and attention spent hundreds of officials from relatively small ones to the most important. Spended simply because some generals who made business on their state duties tried to shut up a journalist telling about their corruption.

This is the price of corruption, this is a minus of some kind of percentage of economic growth. And from these shares, stagnation is formed. "