بروز و تداوم فساد در توسعه اقتصادی

Economic development and bureaucratic corruption are determined jointly in a dynamic general equilibrium model of growth, bribery and tax evasion. Corruption arises from the incentives of public and private agents to conspire in the concealment of information from the government. These incentives depend on aggregate economic activity which, in turn, depends on the incidence of corruption. The model produces multiple development regimes, transition between which may or may not occur. In accordance with recent empirical evidence, the relationship between corruption and development is predicted to be negative.

Public sector corruption is pervasive throughout the world. In one form or another, and to a lesser or greater degree, it exists in all societies, at all stages of development and under all types of politico-economic regime. Over the past few years, the fight against corruption, particularly in developing countries, has become high on the agenda of various international organisations, such as the World Bank and IMF (e.g., Jain, 2001 and Rose-Ackerman, 1997). This has been motivated by a deepening belief that good quality governance is essential for sustained economic development. Recent innovations at the empirical level have allowed this belief to be tested, and there is now a large body of evidence to support it. By contrast, there remains relatively little by way of formal theoretical analysis that would lend rigour and precision to the arguments involved. Our objective in this paper is to provide such an analysis.1

Corruption can occur on various scales, in many shapes and forms, and at all levels within public office. Corruption can affect the allocation of resources, the process of growth and the distribution of income in an economy. These observations are not new, but they have only recently become the subject of systematic, formal investigation using modern techniques of theoretical and empirical analysis. As a result of this, economists are gaining a much better understanding of the causes and consequences, incidence and importance, of corrupt behaviour within society's public institutions. This paper has focused on corruption among public bureaucrats and the implications of this for economic development. Our analysis incorporates the essential features that government intervention requires public officials to gather information and administer policies, and that at least some of these officials are corruptible in the sense of being willing to misrepresent information at the right price. These features reflect the three main conditions for any type of corruption to occur – namely, that there is a delegation of authority from a principal to an agent, that this authority can be exploited to capture economic rents, and that these rents are large enough to motivate pursuit of them. Of course, to the extent that bribes are merely transfer payments from some individuals to others, corruption need not impose any net social costs. As with any illegal activity, however, at least some resources will be spent on trying to conceal rent-seeking behaviour. To the extent that these resources could have been devoted to more productive activities, then such behaviour will result in lower investment and lower capital accumulation. This is the mechanism by which corruption affects development in our model. At the same time, the incentives to be corrupt are likely to change with changes in economic circumstances. As growth takes place and incomes rise, agents will stand to lose more if they are caught engaging in corrupt practices which therefore become less attractive to them. This is the mechanism by which development affects corruption in the model. The upshot is that both corruption and development are determined endogenously through a relationship that is negative and two-way causal. The first property is consistent with all recent empirical evidence and accords with the majority view among development experts that corruption is bad for growth. The second property is notable in two other main respects which are worth reflecting upon.