Profitable Nationalized Services And Corruption

I think it would make sense to make profitable state companies cause corruption with it increasing at a greater rate near the extreme (especially for a state resources company if this was introduced). This would also allow for state companies to make more money without becoming unbalanced.

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I think this is a highly ideological assumption. Countries with high corruption indexes may have this occur with their SOE’s but countries with low corruption indexes like Nordic countries never have this happen with their SOE’s. Having SOE’s in of themselves does not lead to corruption.

Perhaps this would be better stated as your country’s corruption index should affect revenues from SOE’s.

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SOEs necessarily pervert government incentives when it comes to contracts, anti-trust regulations and so on. The extent to which this actually manifests in corrupt practices is dependent on the factors that disincentivise corruption generally, but the incentives are still different. Countries with low corruption have low corruption for a bunch of reasons, so I don’t think representing a necessary, systemic effect on government decision making would be a radical ideological statement. The effect definitely shouldn’t be all that pronounced. Maybe it can scale with some other variables.

Have a look at this paper (https://openaccess.nhh.no/nhh-xmlui/bitstream/handle/11250/2453224/masterthesis.PDF?sequence=1) concerning the corruption risk of SOEs (Norway’s, coincidentally). It’s not highly cited but I couldn’t find anything else that addressed your specific claim (meta-literature has found this topic rather unexplored), so this is the best we have for a scientific examination of the relationship.

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The paper you cite says that SOE’s tend to have more robust public accounting and transparency methods which therefore lowers corruption risk and therefore there isn’t enough evidence to support the claim either way.

How about private sector corruption? Let me give you the example of the big 3 credit ratings agencies all committing what amounted to fraud by rating junk subprime mortgage CDO’s as AAA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_rating_agencies_and_the_subprime_crisis

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Just trying to inject some science into what would otherwise just be an exchange of anecdotal evidence and tired talking points. No need to engage in whataboutism or whatever. The discussion isn’t about the private sector, so I’d ask you didn’t treat me as some sort of ideologue who needs to be debated on its merits. It’s really exhausting, and it’d be nice not to have to deal with a combative forum for once, you know?

Edit: misunderstood what you were saying in the first instance

It’s always great to be accused of capitalism one place and socialism in another! ;D

Hold on, this is already in the game. There is a link between nationalised services and corruption at the very high end, and at the low end, they are profitable!

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We don’t have any profit for water, electricity, rail, etc. unless I am mistaken. We only have it for postal and health. I think that elsewhere it was mentioned that selling off the state broadcaster doesn’t bring in any money.

You can have it at the very low end, that for gameplay purposes, it basically desn’t exist.

Really, for what gameplay reasons?

The downsides of runing it at profit, angering trade unionists and decreasing unemployment less than their private counterpart doesn’t make it worth on hard leftist plays and in other kind of plays is just better to leave it private.
And the risk of a rail strike, I was forgetting that.

There really doesn’t seem to be any benefit to the state producing or selling natural resources as of yet in game. Which makes me wonder how it would be added. Just having a SOE doesn’t make one a leftist. One need only look at Russia and how it gets 36% of its federal budget from natural resource sales.

But the thing that produce a surplus is other state bussines, not just the utilities that are comonly run at a break even poin or more likely at loss to ensure that the service is provided.

So there should be some revenue out even though the government puts money in. Like with Satellite Pricing. Expensive to Establish the system, but it’s not like you get no money from SOEs even if you don’t make a profit.

For example, currently all industries are at a big loss, unless you make them explicitly for profit, but even if you’re running them at a loss, its not as if people don’t pay for meds or consultation, the costs are just really reduced, they’re nominal. So you put something in and you get something out, right? Or am I making a mistake here?

I imagine that SOEs should be like the welfare fraud department or satellite road pricing, very expensive, but you still get money from them.