Gifts

According to an article in the November 29 issue of The Economist, when China banned gifts to government officials, sales of the principal producer of baijiu, a sort of Chinese vodka, fell 78% in just a year.

The only sales that would likely go down if gifts were banned across the board in the United States would be restaurant and golf club sales. That is because petty bribery is less a problem here than the ongoing reciprocal relationships between lobbyists and the government officials their clients are seeking to influence.

Former lobbyist, now jailbird, Kevin A. Ring shared some valuable words of wisdom in an op-ed piece in the Washington Post this week.

Five years ago, I wrote a blog post about gifts and reciprocity, based on a classic anthropological work, Lewis Hyde's The Gift.

I want to revisit a situation I mentioned a few days ago in a post about ethics reform.

An excellent article on the front page of last Sunday's New York Times looks at a proposal by the federal Office of Governmental Ethics (OGE) to limit two exceptions to the prohibition on accepting gifts from lobbyists:  the "widely-attended gathering" (WAG) exception and the "social invitations" exception.

India and China have not only been the home of new varieties of entrepreneurialism. In these countries, creative individuals have also come up with novel approaches to dealing with local government corruption.

An expatriate Indian physics professor in the U.S. came up with the brilliant idea of a Zero-Rupee Note to hand out in situations where local officials expect or ask for bribes.