"If a government can't raise taxes, they can't run a proper government or pay their civil servants enough to keep them honest," said Jeremy Pope, executive director of Transparency International, an organization that tracks government corruption.
For one thing, the inverse relationship between wages and corruption does not always hold; El Salvador, for example, pays its bureaucrats far more than the average factory worker but still ranks towards the bottom of the corruption index.Moreover, paying civil servants enough to persuade them to reject bribes and kickbacks is itself costly.
Officially, some senior civil servants earn enough only to cover the cost of transport to work.
In retrospect, it was a traditional classic crisis, but in a very, very different guise: different types of financial instruments, different types of institutions, which made it, for a historian like me, more difficult to see.That one of the world's most powerful public servants had enough critical distance to admit to error before leaving office must surely be part of his legacy.
She marries Woodrow Sundiata, a minister in the corrupt government of William Tolbert, bears him three children and inhabits a bubble of privilege as the white wife of a high government official, with servants and enough leisure to devote to animal rescue.
"Poorly paid and badly treated public servants have had enough.
But the tenderness, the affection, he feels towards his young servants is genuine enough, on its own terms, and gave an emotional centre to our show.
Diplomats here estimate that Mr. Gbagbo's government was able to pay 50 to 80 percent of the 144,000 civil servants in February, enough to keep some cash in circulation, in what has largely been a cash economy anyway.
At the very least you're talking about hiring hundreds of civil servants cold-hearted enough to turn a blind eye to the murder of thousands of their fellow countrymen.
The Countess of Carnarvon says she has tried to tell producers that the table is being set incorrectly for dinner, and that there are not enough servants, but has been ignored.
Sawers, 58, has been in post since 2009 and has apparently decided that 36 years as a public servant is long enough.
