1
The institutional structure of corruption: firm competition and the choice of
institutional strategy.
Vincent Fitzsimons*
Whilst governance and particularly corruption have been the focus of much attention in both
the economic literature and also the ‘policy community’ of the Washington institutions, the
determinants of corruption are still dealt with too often using ad hoc models that fail to
satisfactorily explain the determinants or likely patterns of corruption. Generally corruption
has been explained in terms of administrative pay and efficiency wages, suggesting that the
relative levels of state and private sector pay may determine the motivation for officials to
become corrupt. In addition the extent of government regulation has been criticised on the
grounds that it creates effective ‘shadow prices’ for state-provided services (Ehrlich and Liu,
1999) that may differ sharply from their market values, thus creating an opportunity for
officials to extract rents during the provision of public services. In fact these models should
be seen in a complementary way, explaining in combination the corruption of the provision of
state services.
Whilst the ‘supply’ of corruption has thus been covered in a fairly thorough fashion, the
companies who become involved as clients to corrupt officials are examined in relation to the
general levels of economic performance that prevail in highly corrupt economies. Corruption,
like taxation and regulation, has generally been viewed as a restrictive factor in the
performance of economies (see Mauro, 1995; Wei, 2000; Jaffe et al., 1995 respectively).
This paper extends the examination of the ‘demand’ side for corruption by placing it against
alternative strategies that firms may adopt using different institutional routes: through forms
of activity seeking to win advantage within the market, political and legal institutional
structures of the economy. In this perspective, the attempts of firms to perform acts of ‘state
capture’ (Hellman et al, 2000) rather than simple bribing of administrative or judicial officials
(see Kaufmann & Wei, 2000) appears more a rational strategy to pursue competitive
advantage by use of the most efficient institutional arrangements. This approach has a
distinct advantage in realistically explaining actual behaviour of firms as it emphasises the
inevitability of corruption from opportunistic firms operating in an environment where
redistribution of property rights need not only be pursued through the ‘pursuit of profit’ as
described by the orthodox economic analysis.
Ultimately, corruption should be seen as a complementary form of competition to that
conducted in the market arena, and the inevitability of corruption should be seen as strong
grounds for the imposition of (considered) regulation rather than its removal as often
advocated by neo-liberal economists in both academic economics and the Washington
institutions.
Paper presented at Institute for Development Policy and Management and Global Poverty
Research Group conference ‘Redesigning the State? Political Corruption in Development
Policy and Practice’, Dalton-Ellis Hall, University of Manchester, UK, Friday 25 November
2005.
*Vincent G. Fitzsimons
Senior Lecturer in Economics
University of Huddersfield
Queensgate
Huddersfield
HD1 3DH, United Kingdom
v.fitzsimons@hud.ac.uk
2
The institutional structure of corruption: firm competition and the choice of
institutional strategy.
I Introduction
The concept of corruption is one of general relevance to economists. From both
historical and current occurrences of corruption it is evident that it is a problem of a
fundamental type to economic as well as political institutions. And yet despite this
there appears a resistance against the need to admit its significance and adequately
integrate corruption into the analysis of mainstream economic problems as well, to
some degree, as a failure to apply mainstream analysis to corruption itself.
Those seriously considering corruption may be right to be wary of an over-reliance on
mainstream economic principles.
The simplifying assumptions of orthodox
economics often produce models of behaviour with one-dimensional theoretical
agents who are either entirely beneficent or opportunistic, neither of which sits easily
with their assumed tendency to calculate appropriate strategic responses to the
institutional and incentive structures within which they exist. Instead of broadening
the scope of economic analysis in reflection of complex real-world situations, many
mainstream analyses simply map out the implications of initial assumptions to
unremarkable and unrealistic conclusions. Whilst this criticism may also be levelled
to a degree at the New Institutional school of economics which often incorporates
neoclassical or orthodox economic assumptions into their analysis, a broader
economic analysis has been applied to economic problems by others groups such as
the post-Keynesian and Old Institutional economists in a way that expands the scope
for incorporating realistic elements into economic theory. It is argued here that a
broad institutional approach to economic problems enables us to create more
realistic representations of economic activity in a way that is particularly suited to the
analysis of corruption.
Shleifer and Vishny (1993) define corruption as ‘the sale by government officials of
government property for personal gain’ and particularly where ‘they charge
personally for goods that the state officially owns’ such as the rights to certain
activities regulated by the state, or physical property (p.599).
The destructive
potential of corruption is now recognised as ‘corruption has two major defects. The
first of these is that many government activities are desirable; hence, permitting
bribes to get rid of them is undesirable… The second problem is once corruption
becomes established in a government, laws may be enacted for the specific purpose
3
of maximizing the bribes available for permitting people to avoid them.’ (Tullock,
1989, p.659)
Surprisingly, corruption has not always been seen as a cost to economies or an
obstacle to the operation of markets, despite its distortionary and redistributive
potential. Much of the early work on corruption reflects the typical analysis of political
corruption amongst an American academic community concerned with the imperfect
nature of government interventions into the economy, as reviewed in Werlin (1973).
Werlin quotes Key (1970) that ‘ “bribery has been a convenient way to avoid legal
requirements which may be impracticable of application” ’ (Werlin, p.71) and that
underprivileged groups had used corruption constructively to overcome obstacles to
their development. In fact, legal systems in underdeveloped countries were such that
‘corruption is functional in emerging countries because of the conditions under which
legislation is generally formulated and administered’ (p.72, attributed to Samuel
Huntington, 1968).
He concludes that corruption, at its most blatant during the
nineteenth century in the U.S., did not significantly restrict the development of its
economy in this period. Despite this, he cites cases from Ghanaian commissions of
investigation that demonstrated the disruptive effects of corruption.
He cites
distortions to government activity that included selection of products for government
contracts on the basis of the ‘commission’ available on them rather than suitability,
and granting of export licences, out of export quotas, that were excessively large for
the companies involved in order to increase the size of the appropriate associated
kick-back (p.74).
Explanations of corruption have generally depended on a critical approach to the role
of the state and to state-regulation in particular, suggesting that corruption, and
general problems of governance, follow closely on from state interference in the
economy. Ehrlich and Liu (1999) summarise the view stating that ‘any government
intervention in the economy assigns some resource allocation responsibilities to a
bureaucratic structure. Since the shadow prices generated thereby typically deviate
from free-market prices, an incentive arises to close the gap by various side
payments, or bribes. Exercising the opportunity to obtain such rents is what is here
meant by corruption.’ (p.S272)
They conclude that corruption is inevitable in a
bureaucratic system, due to the potential of administrative price-setting and allocation
for the creation of rents or unearned benefits which will attract individual and
collective attempts to ‘capture’ these.
As indicated in the early literature on
corruption, such rent-seeking behaviour involves many groups in expenditures that
4
are entirely non-productive, in the attempt to persuade administrators to favour their
claims to the rents created and win the potential gains (see Krueger, 1974) imposing
potentially significant social losses on developing economies in particular. Tullock
(1998) notably points out in his work that rent-seeking behaviour is in many cases a
negative-sum game.
Where the corrupt payments are simply transfer payments, say between an absolute
monarch owning monopoly rights and a firm purchasing them, the corruption need
not have an immediate social cost, but this is rarely the case. In a competitive
economy with a relatively democratic state practicing widespread transfer payments
the market valuation has already deviated from that of a competitive market economy
in the creation of both non-market shadow prices for public goods and non-market
prices in marketed goods. Although the pre-existing nature of the distortion ensures
that direct economic impacts cannot be deduced, groups will offer large incentives to
create further distortions. The most direct impact of such distortions is simply to
create significant new incentives for the acquisition of political capital that gives
access to such rents, an activity that is already seen as a rational economic strategy
(Olson, 1982).
In such a way, a ‘capture economy’ (Hellman et al, 2000) may
develop.
Overall, corruption is old and it is widespread, a problem of both the developed and
the developing worlds. The problems of corruption surely appear significant enough
to motivate any government to act decisively against it. The economists’ view of
government, however, appears to have initially been too simplistic in this respect.
Certainly bad and failing policies are as common in developed as developing
countries (Ritzen et al., 2000) as policy makers are committed to policies due to
domestic and short-term considerations that may appear irrational in view of long-run
analyses of impacts. Also Guasch & Hahn’s (1997) recognition that the difficulties of
evidence on policy/regulation impact assessments is often unpersuasive for the
purposes of electoral politics suggests that governments are hindered in a variety of
ways in their attempts to deal with problems such as corruption. Possibly due to this,
evidence demonstrates that policing of ‘victimless crimes’ is much less successful
than that of common crime (Ehrlich and Liu, 1999, p.S272).
II Evidence on corruption
As well as the evidence of commissions of enquiry in specific countries, work by
authors such as Mauro (1995) and Wei (2000) has brought the issue of corruption to
5
greater prominence in recent years. The investigation and quantification of negative
impacts of corruption for economies has renewed the impetus behind efforts to
explain corruption and, as is now assumed to be appropriate, combat it.
Such
studies have demonstrated a negative relationship between corruption and forms of
investment, with negative impacts on investment being greater than established
deterrents such as taxation for international investment decisions. The evidence is
limited in two respects, however, as corruption measures are less robust when
included in larger growth models than might be expected.
In addition existing
measures of corruption are questionable due to the range of influences on them and
their subjective nature, being based largely on surveys of opinions of relative
corruption such as those conducted by organisations such as Transparency
International and Freedom House. Whilst World Bank attempts to combine various
subjective measures into composite indices of corruption and other institutional
variables (see Kaufmann, Kraay & Zoido-Lobaton, 2002) provide promising
improvements in reliability, the risk of systematic bias in opinion surveys remains a
significant problem for the interpretation of empirical work based on such data.
Recent attempts have been made to produce more objective data using detailed
research into corrupt behaviour that quantifies the impacts of corruption on firms and
in the public sector. Reinikka & Svensson (2002) cite evidence from surveys of
budget allocation versus delivery (Public Expenditure Tracking Surveys, or PETS,
executed at the various levels of public administration) and firm-level surveys of
bribe-paying in the Ugandan economy.
The evidence suggests stark facts of life in
corrupt economies: 13% of the non-wage school budget of Uganda reaches actual
schools, with individual cases’ allocation depending largely on their ‘socio-political
endowment’ (p.136), whilst more than 80% of businesses typically have to pay bribes
to do business, with the incidence of payment depending largely on the balance of
profitability (ability to pay) and reallocation costs (“ability to refuse to pay” p.136).
The latter in particular reflects the evidence of Indian and Ghanaian commissions of
enquiry suggesting that corrupt officials may create delays in order to levy bribes to
overcome them (Santhanam report cited in Myrdal, 1968) or inflate the allocation of
licence rights above the levels requested by applicants in order to levy larger charges
for their corrupt provision (Ollennu commission cited in Werlin, 1973). In such cases
corrupt officials obviously solicit payments due to self-interest or dissatisfaction.
Whilst this may give the impression that corruption is a problem created by
administration, evidence from the World Bank’s ‘BEEPS’ survey of countries in
6
transition in Central and Eastern Europe suggests that new or foreign entrant firms
may seek corrupt arrangements strategically as a way to ‘finesse’ existing
relationships and patterns of influence in an economy (Hellman, Jones & Kauffman,
2000). In this situation, firms act strategically to outmanoeuvre competitors who
enjoy advantages of possessing what might be termed corrupt ‘network capital’ in a
rational response to an imperfect market environment, largely in line with the
principles of neoclassical models of the firm, although these ‘transactions’ occur
outside economic markets but instead occur in the political or legal marketplace.
Influence, rather than explicit capture or purchase of officials favours, is unclear in
nature from the mainstream economic viewpoint as it is not associated with direct
economic gains, but rather seems to be a consequence of connections and sociopolitical association in former planned economies. In order for a theoretical analysis
to capture the balance of influences in such circumstances, a wider institutional
interpretation is essential.
It is clear from above that the anecdotal evidence on corruption’s impacts appears
largely mixed, leading to recent attempts to analyse the positive ‘greasing the wheels’
view of corruption by Kaufmann and Wei (2000). Lui (1985) had already argued that
bribe-payers with varying time-preferences could find an ‘optimal’ re-ordering of
service provision without leading to administrators artificially creating delays.
Kaufmann & Wei (2000), however, suggest that bribes are only effective in
‘managing’ red tape when the extent of bureaucratic burdens and process delays are
exogenously determined. In a model where these are endogenised, delay-creation is
a popular strategy amongst administrators, as suggested by evidence from the realworld, and firms who pay bribes and by doing so, presumably, reveal their timepreference are in response subject to higher bureaucratic and regulatory burdens.
Of course, corruption is a concept which is difficult to precisely define, such as in the
distinction between state capture for some pecuniary or other gain versus influence
which would by many be viewed as separate from corruption. As Rose-Ackerman
(1999) recognises:
‘corruption has different meanings in different societies. One person’s bribe is
another person’s gift. A political leader or public official who aids friends,
family members, and supporters may seem praiseworthy in some societies
and corrupt in others.’ (p.5)
Subjective assessments of corruption, which form the basis of many of the existing
datasets, are vulnerable to significant bias, and this may explain why high-profile
7
‘political scandals’ in Western democracies such as the USA or UK do not feed
through to poorer ratings for corruption in survey data.
Where to draw the line
between legitimate and illegitimate activities is a decision with few objective points of
reference and is largely culturally specific.
Incumbent groups may view their
accumulated political capital as property whose associated rights are ‘wrongly’
threatened by reforms, and particularly by anti-corruption strategies, and so act to
undermine the actions of reformers. In this context even the actions of NGOs are
inherently tied up in problems of distributive conflicts and potentially bear negative
impacts on the economy just as in studies of ‘open’ political re-distribution through
the democratic process (see for instance Przeworski & Limongi, 1993).
III Anticorruption strategies
The problem of corruption is significantly complicated by its frequent embeddedness
in the political institutions, either formal or informal, of corrupt economies. Tullock
(1989), reflecting on the work of Robert Klitgaard, concluded that ‘governments in
Third World countries normally have no objection to corruption on the part of their
officials. Indeed, the president is rather likely getting a rake-off.’ (p.658) Whilst
international financial institutions (IFIs) are now attempting to deal with such
problems, those working at the country level, and aid executives for donor
organisations, must be ‘willing to turn off the faucet. In general, they really are not
willing to do so, and in any event, frequently do not have the power to do so.’ (p.659).
The author of this paper found similar attitudes when discussing the problem of
Russian extortion of ‘aid’ with World Bank executives.
One anonymously
summarised the attitude of IFIs to the Russian problem succinctly: ‘at least we’re still
talking.’ Other considerations all too often prevail.
Advice on how to deal with corruption varies widely, but a number of principles have
been suggested variously as being ‘central’ to the problem of corruption. Studies
have attempted to design anti-corruption strategies that adopt a principal-agent
approach that depends on shirker-style efficiency wage models after Shapiro &
Stiglitz (1984) which incorporate relative rewards and risks to economic agents, given
a framework of supporting institutions, to prevent corruption. Corruption is often
conducted by members of ruling elites, however, who cannot be easily described as
being corrupt for reasons of being poor or unsatisfactorily rewarded. The focus of
such models on the decision making of the individual also tends to reinforce the view
that officials are sole instigators of corruption, a view which is not compatible with
evidence from the transition countries (see Hellman et al., 2000, and above).
8
Others treat corruption as the consequence of poorly defined legal rights or poorly
delivered government interventions. North (1990), for instance, has emphasised the
need for an efficient legal system to reduce or at least deter corruption and foster the
development of trust in economies, although Huntington’s criticism of the
development of legal systems (above) makes it unlikely that such efficient systems
will develop where most needed, and may perhaps account for the persistence in
many countries of well-documented corruption.
Some models examine the possibility that ‘indoctrination’ can have beneficial
consequences on levels in specific cultures (see Shleifer & Vishny, 1993, p.599-600),
in essence reducing the relative benefits of being corrupt. Dobel (1978) outlines
various approaches to the problem of corruption that associate it with negative
cultural changes damaging to the society in which it occurs. This ‘demise of loyalty
to the commonwealth… results in certain identifiable patterns of political conflict and
competition.’ (p.958) Thus corruption forms a connection between cultural, economic
and governance institutions that determine patterns of economic behaviour. Whilst
this is not as clearly focussed on officials as the decision makers responsible for
‘creating’ corruption, this focus partly remains, as does the problem of the
acceptability of cultural manipulation by largely Western or Western-backed
institutions already subject to criticisms of neo-colonialism in their policies.
International financial institutions have an obvious incentive in reducing corruption’s
negative impacts in order to enhance the effectiveness of their own projects and so
have paid increasing attention to combating corruption recently. The efforts of the
World Bank to reduce corruption in the transitional countries of central and eastern
Europe have gone some way to correct the massive losses to corruption experienced
by the IMF and World Bank in the region by developing a more complex anticorruption framework (World Bank, 2000, p.xxii) reforming political accountability,
(creating) competitive private sector, (meritocratic) public sector management, civil
society participation and institutional restraints, each of these elements involving a
range of detailed sub-sector reforms. The Asian Development Bank’s (ADB) success
in reducing corruption levels in Hong Kong and Singapore, however, is attributed to a
much simpler approach. Its July 1998 Anticorruption Policy simply focussed on:
‘’supporting competitive markets, and efficient, effective, accountable, and
transparent public administration, in the belief that efforts towards prevention
will ultimately be more effective in the long run; supporting promising
9
anticorruption efforts on a case-by-case basis and improving the quality of the
dialogue with our developing member countries (DMCs) on a range of
governance issues, including corruption; and ensuring that our projects and
our staff adhere to the highest ethical standards.’ (Shin, 1999, p.2)
A long-run approach to the problem, and assessing anticorruption policies on their
merits and in their specific context appears to increase the overall effectiveness of an
anti-corruption strategy, from the ADB case. It also views corruption in the context of
general governance rather than as an isolated problem. This is also raised in the
World Bank’s more recent anti-corruption approach for transition (Gray et al., 2004)
which emphasises the complex and changing nature of corruption where ‘the more
effective that existing measurement efforts are at shedding light on corrupt practices
in society, the more efforts will be made by corrupt members of that society to
transform those practices into less visible and measurable forms.’ (p.6) In view of
these strategies, it is increasingly important that a general framework for the
examination of corruption in its more general context is developed in order to help the
future analysis of this complex problem. Such an approach is outlined below.
IV Model
Whilst the issue of corruption may be analysed or tackled somewhat problematically
in the ways discussed above, the lack of an overall framework inevitably hampers
efforts to provide systematic analysis of the problem itself, and hence constrains
attempts at producing sound anti-corruption policy.
The pragmatic, one-by-one
approach to assessing and implementing corruption fixes has met with great success
in certain cases, but these would be made considerably simpler if a greater
understanding of the problem existed.
The theoretical framework that has been applied to corruption has only slowly
developed despite its prevalence. It is only recently that more detailed analysis has
been conducted into patterns of corruption and the differences between forms of and
motivation for corruption. In fact, different types of corruption exist – state capture,
administrative influence, basic bribes, all induce individuals in ‘agent’ positions
(assuming a democratic political system, mandates, and compatible responsibilities
within the administration of the state) to act in violation of their positions as stated by
‘principals’. The ‘corruption decision’, where it has been considered at all for the firm,
has largely been viewed in isolation, however, with little recognition of its position
within the range of strategic opportunities to the firm.
10
The strategic nature of corruption has received partial recognition in that corruption
may be seen as a normal business behaviour in certain circumstances (Hellman et
al., 2000) and is subject to the usual calculative criteria with the problem of
calculating optimal bribes given corrupt environments (Lui, 1985). Baumol (1990)
has also recognised that entrepreneurial decision-making includes choices between
legitimate (‘productive’) activity such as competitive innovation and illegitimate
(‘destructive’) forms of activity such as rent-seeking (p.893).
The admission that entrepreneurs may solicit corrupt behaviour in administrators
appears to be some ‘omerta’ of neoclassical economics only broken by the most
respected economists (see for instance Baumol, 1990). Rather than admit the ability
of organisations to pursue influence through a range of institutional avenues and
through both legitimate and illegitimate means, economists normally impose implicit
constraints on collective organisational activity to the ‘legitimate’ sphere of business,
namely market exchange, which has lead to the perpetuation of unrealistic theory of
only limited relevance in its application. The parallel can be drawn to the pursuit in
regulation theory of a market-based solution to market failure (see Shleifer, 2000)
which appears at least slightly contradictory in its fundamental terms, and whose
logic depends crucially on implicit behavioural assumptions. In this way, judges are
ascribed different motivations from entrepreneurs or politicians as individuals. This
has at least the advantage that it moves beyond the theoretical assumption of a
beneficent state which undermined public choice theory in its infancy, but this
approach to regulation of course also places ‘the court’ as an impartial arbitrator
where ‘the state’ was not, ignoring both strong evidence of legal corruption and also
legal ineffectiveness.
Many types of economic agents in the mainstream analysis are implicitly constrained
in their activities only to within prescribed roles. Corruption and opportunism must,
more realistically, be at least considered a possibility in all institutional structures.
The true implications of the neoclassical assumptions of rationality and selfinterested behaviour by amoral economic agents, however, if followed to their logical
conclusion is that corruption is in fact inevitable, with the extent of corruption
depending on both the costs and benefits of corruption, but also on the relative costs
and benefits of all other strategic possibilities.
11
It is argued here that the principles of competitive equilibrium, neoclassical
behavioural assumptions, and a recognition that firms may participate in any
institutional form of collective action strategically, produce a more complex but also
more realistic and accurate framework for the determination of levels of corruption.
Other authors have generalised the principle of consumer equilibrium before, with
benefits to the accuracy of their models. Dorfman & Steiner (1954) apply the concept
of a general consumer equilibrium to the firm’s decision on its ‘consumption’ of
marketing when faced with a range of strategies capable of maximising profits.
Similarly we can extend the concept of competitive equilibrium to the problem of
corruption, viewing it as one of a range of strategic approaches to acquisition of
property rights.
The concept of consumer equilibrium is one of a small number that form the
foundation of economic analysis of consumer behaviour, and which jointly produce
the positive conclusions for the beneficial role of the market mechanism in
maximising welfare levels in economies. It can be simply stated for a selection of ‘i’
goods that, in order to maximise utility, consumers of products will consume the
range of goods in a combination which meets their budget constraints, raising their
consumption of the goods until the ratio of (declining) marginal utility to unit price is
the same for every good such that:
MU1 / P1 = MU2 / P2 = … = MUi /Pi
(1)
The principle can be simply adapted into a more general form by considering these
principles as comparable to those of marginal cost and benefit such that a general
‘consumption’ equilibrium for a range of strategic behaviours ‘i’ can be stated:
MB1 / MC1 = MB2 / MC2 = … = MBi / MCi
(2)
This principle would definitely lead to similar outcomes to that of a consumer
equilibrium if the benefits of a strategic course decline as its use increases, similar to
the decline in utility return to consumption as levels rise; and more controversially, if
marginal costs of these strategies rise in line with their use (which is not always
assumed to be the case)i. In this case, use of each strategy would increase until (MB
– MC) for a ‘unit’ of the strategy was equal for each strategic possibility.
In
considering this ‘equilibrium’ for competitive firms, these strategic behaviours could
take any form, not simply the pursuit of profit through normal market competition.
12
Any institutional avenue may be open to the firm in practice, not excluding ones that
are technically proscribed, if we view this in its practical application. Firms may
consider expenditures in lobbying for self-beneficial changes in legal codes, open
market competition, public relations and promotions all to be comparable strategic
behaviours that may benefit the firm.
Table I Economics of Institutions (NIE view)
Level
Frequency
(years)
Purpose (NIE view)
L4:
Neoclassical
economics/agency
theory
Resource allocation Continuous
Get the marginal conditions
and
employment
right. 3rd order economizing
(prices and quantities;
incentive alignment)
L3: Transaction cost Governance: play of 1 to 10
Get
the
governance
economics
the game – esp.
structures right. 2nd order
contract
(aligning
economizing
governance structures
with transactions)
L2:
Economics of Institutional
10 to 100
Get
the
institutional
property rights/positive environment: formal
environment right. 1st order
political economy
rules of the game –
economizing
esp. property (polity,
judiciary,
bureaucracy)
L1: Social theory
Embeddedness:
100 to 1000
Often
noncalculative;
informal institutions,
spontaneous
customs,
traditions,
norms, religion
Source: adapted from Williamson (2000) p.597. Each level determines the institutions of that level
above, and is in turn susceptible to feedback effects from those institutions above. North (1971) calls
levels 1&2 fundamental/primary and level 3 secondary institutions. The classification of the formal,
hierarchical and market levels as ‘economizing’, and the social level ‘non-calculative’ reflects the NIE,
and particularly not the OIE, view of social institutions.
Corruption, it appears obvious from its nature, is institutionally determined.
Institutional theory claims to explain a vast range of economic phenomena within its
analytical framework and yet only a limited range of institutional analysis has been
applied to corruption. The institutional structure of the society overall has impacts on
the economic elements of individual interaction, and a wide and complexly evolving
range of institutional forms exist in any modern economy (Table I).
Typically
research looks into the social, legal & political, organisational and market levels of
institutionalised behaviour, and each of these may offer avenues for strategic
behaviour to enhance the earnings of a firm. Firms may participate in ‘good works’ in
order to prove social credentials that may ultimately create some pay back for the
business. Similarly the firms may specifically target legal or political institutions for
their concerted or individual action. The opportunities open to firms across the full
range of institutional types creates a considerably more complex view of the potential
behaviour of the firm.
13
If we view the firm as the ‘consumer’ of corruption, or more specifically of the undersupplied or discretionary public services which provide firms with potential gains if
corruption is possible, then a consumer equilibrium will occur across a range of types
of institutional strategy which would accrue gains for the firm. Many of the firm’s
activities in the purchase of political or social capital are largely, although not
universally, interpreted as corruption, but these are in fact only some of a wider range
of strategies that firms may use, both legitimate and illegitimate, or perhaps
constructive and destructive or purely redistributive, to produce gains for themselves.
V Implications
The treatment of corruption as a largely institutionally determined behaviour and the
recognition of the firm as a potential consumer of corruption, rather than being
necessarily an innocent victim of it, rectify some of the problems in the existing
analysis.
Several issues obviously remain, however, that require further
examination. In particular, the treatment above is not open to criticisms of being
simplistic and one-dimensional, but a detailed analysis of the demand for corruption
still needs an examination of the determinants of all the relative costs and benefits of
the forms of institutional strategy of which corruption is one. Of course, several such
factors have already been examined in the theoretical and empirical literature, such
as the nature and effectiveness of legal systems following North (1990).
In addition to efforts at elaborating upon the theory of ‘consumption of corruption’,
however, the supply side of corruption still needs to be comprehensively re-examined
in order to enable analysis to better predict actual levels of corruption. Whilst the
model of consumption or demand for corruption above may indicate as yet unexamined determinants of corruption and relationships between corruption and other
related phenomena, both supply factors and demand factors would of course need
careful and co-ordinated examination in order to form accurate predictions of levels
of corruption, if this is possible.
It is possible that certain factors are joint
determinants of both the demand for and supply of corruption, and it would be purely
fortuitous for these relationships to operate in a simple fashion. For example, if lax
legal institutions encourage both the demand for corruption and supply of corruption,
the impacts would remain unclear overall. Such contradictions, once exposed, could
at least help explain failures in current models to accurately describe corruption in the
real world.
14
In addition to the above, the model has implications for the generally hostile
approach of IFIs to state regulation in their analysis of corruption.
Corruption,
taxation and regulation, have generally been viewed as a restrictive factor in the
performance of economies (see Mauro, 1995; Wei, 2000; Jaffe et al., 1995
respectively).
Deregulation is thought to be essential in order to create efficient
markets: the analysis above of course has serious implications for firms’ market
activity. In particular, World Bank anti-corruption strategies explicitly emphasise the
central role of deregulation, advocating broadly neo-liberal economic policies:
‘reducing the benefits to these firms from capture… can be achieved in part
by deepening price and trade liberalisation, increasing transparency… and
introducing greater competition... Reducing the ability of the state to extort
bribes from the private sector requires deregulation.’ (World Bank, 2000,
p.xxiii)
Examples cited involve ‘the elimination of unnecessary licenses and rules and
creating effective institutions for regulation’ (p.xxiii) and the approach does recognise
the essential need for regulation as well as deregulation, leaving an unclear position
overall.
The general hostility of IFIs towards regulation creates the risk that the
emphasis on deregulation may lead to excessive reduction of state powers that may
be necessary either in terms of corruption reduction or other key state objectives.
It is clear from the above that, whilst regulation may create inaccurate ‘shadow
prices’ for publicly provided or regulated services, it is also clear from the analysis of
the demand for corruption that it will remain a potential strategy of organisations in all
economies. This in turn creates a universal need for regulation. On balance, this
invalidates the common assumption that simple de-regulation is a necessary and
effective strategy for improving the operation of economies, and corrupt economies in
particular. It suggests, more realistically, that regulation is a complex and difficult
task that needs to be done sensitively in order to address its potentially destructive
impacts.
Overall, corruption is doubly linked to regulation. Regulation (in price or market entry
interventions) does create rents that attract firms to corrupt behaviour (despite this
straying outside the typical model of firm behaviour!) but it is also required by the
existence of other corruption patterns that would exist independently of the existence
of such regulations.
It is a market failure that cannot be reduced entirely by
deregulation. This confusion requires us to examine the causes or motivations for
corruption. An overall theoretical framework thus aids the analysis of corruption and
15
regulation by linking explanations why it occurs rather than simply describing what
forms occur and how, and thus the analytical framework should aid in policy creation.
VI Conclusion
The treatment of corruption outlined above should have two advantages that should
enable greater clarity in the analysis of corruption as well as providing a greater
potential for the integration of corruption theory and mainstream theories of firm
behaviour. Firstly, an emphasis on the ‘demand’ for or consumption of corruption
counters the strong emphasis in many analyses of corruption that corruption is a
problem of the state. Evidence from the transition economies (Hellman et al., 2000;
Gray et al, 2004) suggests that the relationship between enterprises and the state is
both less uniform and more complex. Secondly, an analysis of the decision making
process for ‘consumers’ of corruption suggests that levels of corruption are not just
dependent on the specific anti-corruption strategies, or even the costs and benefits of
specific cases of corruption, but are in fact dependent on a more complex set of
factors across the institutional forms which firms may participate in for the purpose of
gain. The narrow conception of the activity of the firm and the entrepreneur as being
constrained to a narrow set of economic institutions is dangerously over-simple and
accordingly produces simplistic and misleading conclusions for anti-corruption policy.
A broader, institutional view of economic activity provides the potential to open up the
analysis of corruption in constructive new ways.
This paper extends the examination of the ‘demand’ side for corruption by placing it
against alternative strategies that firms may adopt using different institutional routes:
through forms of activity seeking to win advantage within the market, political and
legal institutional structures of the economy. In this perspective, the attempts of firms
to perform acts of ‘state capture’ (Hellman et al, 2000) rather than simple bribing of
administrative or judicial officials (see Kaufmann & Wei, 2000) appears more a
rational strategy to pursue competitive advantage by use of the most efficient
institutional arrangements. This approach has a distinct advantage in realistically
explaining actual behaviour of firms as it emphasises the inevitability of corruption
from opportunistic firms operating in an environment where redistribution of property
rights need not only be pursued through the ‘pursuit of profit’ as described by the
orthodox economic analysis.
Ultimately, corruption should be seen as a complementary form of competition to that
conducted in the market arena, and the inevitability of corruption should be seen as
16
strong grounds for the imposition of (considered) regulation rather than its removal as
often advocated by neo-liberal economists in both academic economics and the
Washington institutions.
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Although the result may apply even when deviations from these conditions occur,
depending on particular circumstances.
i