I came across this wonderful paper (HT Gulzar) on corrpution from Jakob Svesson
This paper will discuss eight frequently asked questions about public corruption: (1) What is corruption? (2) Which countries are the most corrupt? (3) What are the common characteristics of countries with high corruption? (4) What is the magnitude of corruption? (5) Do higher wages for bureaucrats reduce corruption? (6) Can competition reduce corruption? (7) Why have there been so few (recent) successful attempts to fight corruption? (8) Does corruption adversely affect growth?
We all know what corruption is but I thought it is pretty easy to define it etc. This paper makes you rethink about all the issues on corruption.
In the end he lays out a research agenda on corruption”
In this paper, I posed eight questions about corruption. The answers are often not clear-cut, and there are many issues about corruption we simply know too little about. As the study of corruption evolves, three areas are of particular importance.
First and most urgently, scant evidence exists on how to combat corruption. Because traditional approaches to improve governance have produced rather disappointing results, experimentation and evaluation of new tools to enhance accountability should be at the forefront of research on corruption.
Second, the differential effect of corruption is an important area for research. For example, China has been able to grow fast while being ranked among the most corrupt countries. Is corruption less harmful in China? Or would China have grown even faster if corruption was lower? These types of questions have received some attention, but more work along what context and type of corruption matters is likely to be fruitful.
Finally, the link between the macro literature on how institutions provide a more-or-less fertile breeding ground for corruption and the micro literature on how much corruption actually occurs in specific contexts is weak. As more forms of corruption and techniques to quantify them at the micro level are developed, it should be possible to reduce this mismatch between macro and micro evidence on corruption.
Read on for details. It is really worth it
