Exploring differences in corruption: the role of neighboring countries

The aim of this paper is to study whether corruption spreads across neighboring countries. Spatial econometric techniques are used to analyze corruption interactions, testing whether the perception of corruption in neighboring countries affect a country’s own corruption once other variables are controlled for. For a given country it is found that corruption varies neither with the behavior of its neighbors (there is no endogenous interaction) nor with their exogenous characteristics (there is no contextual interaction). Corruption is therefore not contagious, but neighboring countries tend to show similar levels of corruption because they face similar characteristics and similar institutional environments.     

论国家权限与政府腐败

马克思主义者认为,国家是超出其他一切以维持和维护阶级统治和剥削为职能的一种机构。国家征税是权力当做资本的结果。国家通过征税参与剩余价值的分配,但国家权力资本分配财富不是无限的。在市场经济中,政府对于维护国家经济安全负有重要的责任。制度的腐败导致官员生活的腐化,对官员权力寻租的批判不应当脱离人的本性。     

Capital accumulation of a firm facing an emissions tax

In this paper we consider the dynamic behavior of a firm that is subject to environmental regulation. It is assumed that, in order to prevent firms from polluting the environment excessively, the government imposes an emissions tax. We determine how an emissions tax influences the firm's decisions concerning investments and abatement efforts. In the model we incorporate the realistic property that a given abatement expenditure leads to more pollution reduction when pollution is large. This property implies increasing returns to scale with respect to pollution reduction. It turns out that, together with the usual assumption of decreasing returns to scale with respect to production, this property leads to the occurrence of history-dependent equilibria in case the pollution tax rate is sufficiently large. It is possible to derive an explicit formula for the threshold tax rate above which these history-dependent equilibria can occur. We show that an investment grant by the government can influence the firm so as to approach the equilibrium with a higher capital stock. Finally, we compare our results with those of a related model where the firm faces a strict pollution standard rather than an emissions tax. Among other things, we show that growth is more suppressed under a tax than under a standard when the firm is small.     

也说腐败发展的库兹涅茨曲线

在经济发展的过程中,腐败现象存在一种倒U型的发展轨迹。制度建设的滞后,一方面导致了有害于社会发展的腐败的盛行,另一方面也使得腐败成为了改革和发展的润滑剂。而到了经济增长成熟的阶段,随着制度建设的完善,腐败会逐渐下降。     

Corruption and Age

In recent years the topic of corruption has attracted a great deal of attention. However, there is still a lack of substantial empirical evidence about the determinants of corruption. The major aim in the paper is to investigate empirically the correlation between age and justifiability of corruption. We use data on eight Western European countries from the World Values Survey and the European Values Survey that span the period from 1981 to 1999 to distinguish between an age effect (the changing attitudes of the same cohort over time) and a cohort effect (the differences in attitudes among similar age groups in different time periods). The results suggest that there is a strong age effect and no cohort effect.     

医疗行业腐败的根源与对策

医疗行业的腐败是一个全球性的问题,其产生的根源既存在一定的共性,也与各国的医疗体系自身特点有关。在发展中国家和转型国家,医疗行业腐败现象显得尤为严重。本文回顾了与医疗腐败相关的经济学文献,分析了医疗行业产生腐败现象的根源,并特别指出,转型国家中的医疗腐败现象具有鲜明的时代特征;对医疗腐败具体行为进行了分析,着重研究了转型国家中常见的非正式支付现象;最后,结合我国的特点提出了相关政策建议。     

A contribution to the empirics of press freedom and corruption

We test the relationship between aggregate press freedom and corruption performing a modified extreme bounds analysis. We also test the relation among different forms of restrictions to press freedom using previously unexplored disaggregated data. Our results support the theoretical view that restrictions to press freedom leads to higher corruption. Furthermore, we obtain that both political and economic influences on the media are strongly and robustly related to corruption, while detrimental laws and regulations influencing the media are not. In all cases the evidence indicates, although not conclusively, that the direction of causation runs from a freer press to lower corruption.     

腐败的预警预控体系分析

分析了在我国建立腐败预警预控体系的紧迫性和必要性,界定了腐败预警预控体系的定义和内涵,建立了腐败预警预控体系的结构,并详细阐释了腐败预警预控体系的运用流程,为我国腐败的预警预控工作提供参考和借鉴。     

浅谈如何加强监管杜绝财务腐败

财务腐败是指一个单位因资金监管不到位出现漏洞,或单位的财务管理混乱、不规范而产生的奢侈浪费、挪用公款、贪污、国有资产流失等财务腐败行为。一个国家要保持政治稳定和经济发展,就必须认真解决腐败问题。要杜绝财务腐败的产生,就要从财务人员的自身素质建设、财务制度的建设、加强审计工作的力度等方面进行全面预防。     

Whistleblower laws and exposed corruption in the United States

This research creates a unique internet-based measure of awareness about state-level whistleblower laws and provisions to examine their effects on observed corruption in the United States. Are whistleblower laws complementary or substitutes for other, more direct, corruption control measures? Placing the analysis within the corruption literature, the findings show that greater whistleblower awareness results in more observed corruption and this finding holds across specifications. Internet awareness about whistleblower laws seems relatively more effective at exposing corruption than the quantity and quality of state whistleblower laws themselves.     

政府规模、市场化与地区腐败

Using a panel data at the provincial level during the period of 1989–2004, this paper examines the effects of social and economic factors such as government scale, privatization, openness, and education on regional corruption. Applying a fixed-effect model and IV estimation, we find that government size positively affects the incidence rate of corruption, and the effect becomes larger with the increase in the size of the core department of the government. 1% increase in the core department of the government leads to a 0.68%–1% increase in the number of corruption cases. While the proportion of FDI is positively associated with the corruption of regional officials, the ratio of the import and export trade to GDP is negatively associated with corruption. The impact of privatization on corruption is ambiguous. We also identify the significant impacts of the size and structure of the government expenditure on corruption. __________ Translated from Jingji Yanjiu 经济研究 (Economic Research Journal), 2008, (11): 16–26     

Valuing the social cost of corruption using subjective well being data and the technique of vignettes

Corruption can have an effect on people's happiness and satisfaction, and therefore, can generate a social cost. However, the perceptions of corruption and satisfaction can also vary across subjects, due to socioeconomic and cultural characteristics. This article studies the differences in the perceptions of corruption and satisfaction across subjects, utilizing the technique of vignettes for the correction of the bias that follows from the differences in the response scale across individuals. The evidence comes from a sample of citizens in Spain, who are asked about their perceptions of corruption and personal satisfaction. The results show that there exists a response scale bias, both for corruption and satisfaction. These results are utilized to approximate the social cost of corruption.     

高等学校加强党风廉政建设存在的问题与对策

当前加强高等学校党风廉政建设的紧迫性日益突出,然而目前存在着的诸如思想认识不到位、责任落实不明晰、体制机制不健全、监管力度不够强等方面的问题,严重阻碍了高等学校自身发展与党风廉政建设的步伐。加强高等学校党风廉政建设需要在提高思想认识、加强制度建设与推进民主参与等方面探求切实可行的途径。     

The Social Norm of Tipping: Does it Improve Social Welfare?

Some economists believe that social norms are created to improve welfare where the market fails. I show that tipping is such a norm, using a model in which a waiter chooses service quality and then a customer chooses the tip. The customer’s utility depends on the social norm about tipping and feelings such as embarrassment and fairness. The equilibrium depends on the exact social norm: higher sensitivity of tips to service quality (according to the norm) yields higher service quality and social welfare. Surprisingly, high tips for low quality may also increase service quality and social welfare.     

社会资本在农村集体经济改革中的演变与构建

狭义上的社会资本指网络关系、社会规范以及信任程度,中国农村集体经济在这些方面具有不同于西方国家的特点。论文分析了在中国改革开放这一制度变迁的过程中社会资本发生变化的机理及其对农村集体经济的影响。根据理论研究提出应重构农村集体经济社会资本,这对于建设和谐社会、实现经济转型和提高农民收入等具有重意义。政策含义是：培育农村经济中介和社会中介组织,建立发挥合作经济的作用,明确供销社和信用社合作性质,同时,基层政府和社区的互动应该有边界。     

The nexus of white collar crimes: shadow economy,corruption and uninsured motorists

This article empirically examines the nexus of three white collar crimes: shadow economy, corruption and uninsured motorists. Whereas the shadow economy–corruption linkage has been studied, the linkages with uninsured motorists have not been formally studied. Results, based on US data and accounting for possible bidirectional causalities, show complementarity between shadow economy and corruption and between uninsured motorists and the shadow economy. The magnitude of the impact of uninsured motorists on the shadow economy is greater than that of corruption. In other findings, shadow economy was lower in most prosperous states and in states that did not impose a sales tax.     

The dynamics of environmentalism and the environment

We study the relationship between environmental preferences and the environment. Preferences are transmitted intergenerationally and through social interactions, where we assume that agents are more likely to adopt environmental preferences the larger the amount of pollution. In the basic setting we find that both converge non-monotonically towards an interior steady state. When including technical change we notice that there will be no change in the steady state level of the environment unless technical change is sufficiently strong, which stands in stark contrast to the literature. Upon introducing environmental laws we find that these may lead to a virtually pollution-free environment. This happens if environmental laws are implemented when public support is strong enough.     

Is the Efficiency Wage Efficient? The Social Norm and Organizational Corruption

The effectiveness of efficiency wage incentives is often jeopardized by perverse organizational corruption. We model organizational corruption as a phenomenon of social interaction and relate the substantial psychological role characterizing the social norm to the corruption problem. We find that if the status quo bribery rate within the firm is high, social norms can no longer serve as a sufficient sanction against a corrupt supervisor; pandemic organizational corruption tends to generate a critical mass effect—the snowball effect—which intensifies the corruption effect. This intensified effect, due to the snowballing character of social norms, may more than offset the usual incentive effect of wages, resulting in more widespread shirking in the firm.
JEL classification : D 82; J 41     

Hayek Reads the Literature on the Emergence of Norms

Hayek’s approach to cultural and institutional evolution has been frequently criticized because it is explicitly based on the controversial notion of (cultural) group selection. In this paper this criticism is rejected on the basis of recent works on biological and cultural evolution. The paper’s main contention is that Hayek employed group selection as a tool for the explanation of selection among several equilibria, and not as a vehicle for the emergence of out of equilibrium behavior (i.e., altruism). The paper shows that Hayek’s ideas foreshadowed some of the most promising developments in the current literature on the emergence of norms. JEL Classification: B31, B41     

On corruption,bribes and the exchange of favors

This paper investigates how the availability of alternative forms of bribe payments, on top of money, may facilitate corruption. There are two bribe payment technologies and a Corruptor and a Receiver must agree on the value and on the technology of the bribe. The paper infers which form of payment can be used by analyzing probabilities of punishment, bargaining powers of agents, and relative efficiency of the two different technologies. By assumption, monetary payments have distinct efficiency than do non-monetary favors. If the Receiver has a sufficiently high utility for payments using a particular technology, then only bribes paid via this technology are feasible. There is also a range of intermediate cases where monetary bribery is used if and only if the relative bargaining power of the Receiver is sufficiently large compared to that of the Corruptor.