Corruption in Developing Countries

By Benjamin A. Olken, Rohini Pande. 2012

997 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent years have seen a remarkable expansion in economists' ability to measure corruption. This in turn has led to a new generation of well-identified, microeconomic studies. We review the evidence on corruption in developing countries in light of these recent advances, focusing on three questions: how much corruption is there, what are the efficiency consequences of corruption, and what determines the level of corruption? We find robust evidence that corruption responds to standard economic incentive theory but also that the effects of anticorruption policies often attenuate as officials find alternate strategies to pursue rents.

Subfields: Information Systems, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d024c7c34320b1ff36eacf4d097553c2c139a7b1

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Citations in the corpus

Machine Learning for the Developing World (2018, background): “Such decision support systems could also address needs that are particularly pressing in developing countries, such as corruption (Olken and Pande 2012).”
Disclosure by Politicians (2010, background): “The variable ranges from -100 (completely unfree) to 0 (completely free). source: Treisman (2007), originally taken from Quality of Government Database, at Quality of Government Institute, Goteborg University.”
Institutional Corruption and Election Fraud: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Afghanistan† (2015, background): “This suggests the possibility of multiple equilibria in corruption as discussed in Olken and Pande ( 2011 ) ; the same intervention can have very different effects depending on preexisting political relationships.”
Patronage and Selection in Public Sector Organizations (2020, background): “Of course, as for all types of corrupt exchanges, patronage is a secretive, informal agreement between the parties (Olken and Pande, 2012; Banerjee et al., 2013), making it difficult to isolate its magnitude in a definitive manner.”
Taxation, corruption, and growth (2016, neutral): “We do believe, however, that it is important to bring 10Other settings appear to yield this result more easily– Prakash et al. (2014) find stronger direct support for corruption’s implications on growth in India; Olken and Pande (2012) provide a broader review in the developing country context.”
Does Performance Matter? Evaluating Political Selection Along the Chinese Administrative Ladder (2018, background): “Failure to select politicians of “good quality” leads to incompetent governments and economic failures (Acemoglu, Egorov, & Sonin, 2010; Olken & Pande, 2012).”
Tax me, but spend wisely? Sources of public finance and government accountability (2015, background): “…and considering variations in publicly provided infrastructure that are directly controlled by governments.6 This paper speaks more generally to the larger literature on the political economy of public good provision (see Banerjee et al. (2013) and Olken and Pande (2012) for recent reviews).”
Laboratory Measure of Cheating Predicts School Misconduct (2018, positive): “2002), rampant corruption in developing countries (Pande and Olken 2012; Banerjee et al. 2013), and student and teacher cheating (Jacob and Levitt 2003; Levitt and Lin 2015).”
Corruption Dynamics: The Golden Goose Effect (2013, neutral): “As Olken and Pande (2012) discuss, government wages have received a great deal of attention, yet the empirical evidence has been limited to cross-country regressions and to the indirect test in Di Tella and Schargrodsky (2003) who study the differential effects of an audit crackdown.”
The Happiness Gap in Eastern Europe (2016, neutral): “And third, we contribute to a rich literature on the consequences of corruption for welfare (Bertrand et al., 2007; Mauro, 1995; Pande and Olken, 2012; Rose-Ackerman, 1999; Shleifer and Vishny, 1994).”