IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/30258.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Real State: Inside the Congo's Traffic Police Agency

Author

Listed:
  • Raúl Sanchez de la Sierra
  • Kristof Titeca
  • Haoyang (Stan) Xie
  • Albert Malukisa Nkuku
  • Aimable Amani Lameke

Abstract

This paper provides insight into a corruption scheme in Kinshasa’s traffic police agency. First, various data collection branches show that the agency’s revenue is five times that from fines and is derived from a coalition of traffic police officials, their managers, and judicial police officers scheming to extort drivers. Second, the analysis of an experiment suggests that the scheme subverts service. Third, the scheme appears to be a rational response to the context but its logic is widespread. The findings suggest that coalitions of officials, while being socially costly, can yield large illicit revenue, challenging the notion of state weakness.

Suggested Citation

  • Raúl Sanchez de la Sierra & Kristof Titeca & Haoyang (Stan) Xie & Albert Malukisa Nkuku & Aimable Amani Lameke, 2022. "The Real State: Inside the Congo's Traffic Police Agency," NBER Working Papers 30258, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:30258
    Note: DEV IO LE PE POL
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w30258.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D23 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Organizational Behavior; Transaction Costs; Property Rights
    • D73 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Bureaucracy; Administrative Processes in Public Organizations; Corruption
    • O1 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:30258. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.