IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ngi/dpaper/24-10.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Effect of Competition on Corruption: Evidence from Contractors’Internal Records

Author

Listed:
  • Aamer Shahid

    (National Accountability Bureau of Pakistan)

  • Stephan Litschig

    (National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, Tokyo, Japan)

Abstract

This paper investigates the extent to which competition for public contracts reduces projectlevel rents and bribe payments to public officials. Water supply and sanitation project contractors for the provincial government of Punjab in Pakistan were interviewed on the condition of anonymity and gave access to 237 project-level construction ledgers. Under collusion, contractors pay about 15 percent of the project budget in kickbacks on average. Under competition for the contract, the winning bid and associated available rents go down by about 11 percentage points. Even under competition, public officials take almost 10 percent of the project budget in bribes.

Suggested Citation

  • Aamer Shahid & Stephan Litschig, 2024. "The Effect of Competition on Corruption: Evidence from Contractors’Internal Records," GRIPS Discussion Papers 24-10, National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies.
    • Handle: RePEc:ngi:dpaper:24-10
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://grips.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/2000134/files/DP24-10.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Oriana Bandiera & Michael Carlos Best & Adnan Qadir Khan & Andrea Prat, 2021. "The Allocation of Authority in Organizations: A Field Experiment with Bureaucrats," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 136(4), pages 2195-2242.
    2. Chiappinelli, Olga, 2020. "Political corruption in the execution of public contracts," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 179, pages 116-140.
    3. Alexeev, Michael & Song, Yunah, 2013. "Corruption and product market competition: An empirical investigation," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 103(C), pages 154-166.
    4. Emily Oster, 2019. "Unobservable Selection and Coefficient Stability: Theory and Evidence," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 37(2), pages 187-204, April.
    5. Jean-Jacques Laffont & Jean Tirole, 1993. "A Theory of Incentives in Procurement and Regulation," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 0262121743, April.
    6. Nicolás Campos & Eduardo Engel & Ronald D. Fischer & Alexander Galetovic, 2021. "The Ways of Corruption in Infrastructure: Lessons from the Odebrecht Case," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 35(2), pages 171-190, Spring.
    7. Benjamin A. Olken, 2007. "Monitoring Corruption: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 115(2), pages 200-249.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Lee, Daeyong & Lee, Ju-Yeon & Josephson, Brett W., 2024. "Effects of bid protests against government agencies on firm performance: Role of interorganisational relationship," Economic Analysis and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 81(C), pages 520-540.
    2. Pritchett, Lant, 2023. "Rely (only) on the rigorous evidence” is bad advice," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 119818, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    3. Erica Bosio & Simeon Djankov & Edward Glaeser & Andrei Shleifer, 2022. "Public Procurement in Law and Practice," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 112(4), pages 1091-1117, April.
    4. Arteaga, Fernando & Desierto, Desiree & Koyama, Mark, 2024. "Shipwrecked by rents," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 168(C).
    5. Rodrigo Carril & Andres Gonzalez-Lira & Michael S. Walker, 2022. "Competition under Incomplete Contracts and the Design of Procurement Policies," Working Papers 1327, Barcelona School of Economics.
    6. Ardanaz, Martin & Otálvaro-Ramírez, Susana & Scartascini, Carlos, 2023. "Does information about citizen participation initiatives increase political trust?," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 162(C).
    7. Rustagi, Devesh & Kroell, Markus, 2022. "Measuring honesty and explaining adulteration in naturally occurring markets," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 156(C).
    8. Rodrigo Carril, 2021. "Rules Versus Discretion in Public Procurement," Working Papers 1232, Barcelona School of Economics.
    9. Gallego, J & Prem, M & Vargas, J. F, 2020. "Corruption in the times of pandemia," Documentos de Trabajo 18178, Universidad del Rosario.
    10. Xu, Gang & Wang, Xue & Wang, Ruiting & Yano, Go & Zou, Rong, 2021. "Anti-corruption, safety compliance and coal mine deaths: Evidence from China," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 188(C), pages 458-488.
    11. Ardanaz, Martín & Otálvaro-Ramírez, Susana & Scartascini, Carlos, 2022. "Does Citizen Participation in Budget Allocation Pay? A Survey Experiment on Political Trust and Participatory Governance," IDB Publications (Working Papers) 12256, Inter-American Development Bank.
    12. Bernard Gauthier & Jonathan Goyette, 2016. "Fiscal policy and corruption," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 46(1), pages 57-79, January.
    13. De La O, Ana L. & González, Lucas I. & Weitz-Shapiro, Rebecca, 2023. "Voluntary audits: Experimental evidence on a new approach to monitoring front-line bureaucrats," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 162(C).
    14. Abhijit Banerjee & Rema Hanna, 2012. "Corruption [The Handbook of Organizational Economics]," Introductory Chapters,, Princeton University Press.
      • Hanna, Rema N. & Mullainathan, Sendhil & Banerjee, Abhijit, 2012. "Corruption," Scholarly Articles 8830779, Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
      • Banerjee, Abhijit & Hanna, Rema & Mullainathan, Sendhil, 2012. "Corruption," Working Paper Series rwp12-023, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government.
      • Abhijit Banerjee & Rema Hanna & Sendhil Mullainathan, 2012. "Corruption," Working Papers id:4952, eSocialSciences.
      • Abhijit Banerjee & Sendhil Mullainathan & Rema Hanna, 2012. "Corruption," NBER Working Papers 17968, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    15. Shuichiro Nishioka & Sumi Sharma & Tuan Le, 2023. "Political Regimes and Firms' Decisions to Pay Bribes: Theory and Evidence from Firm-level Surveys," Working Papers 23-04, Department of Economics, West Virginia University.
    16. Sharma, Smriti & Singhal, Saurabh & Tarp, Finn, 2021. "Corruption and mental health: Evidence from Vietnam," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 185(C), pages 125-137.
    17. Jacopo Bizzotto & Alessandro De Chiara, 2022. "Frequent audits and honest audits," UB School of Economics Working Papers 2022/417, University of Barcelona School of Economics.
    18. Yugank Goyal, 2019. "How Governments Promote Monopolies: Public Procurement in India," American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 78(5), pages 1135-1169, November.
    19. Weigel, Jonathan, 2020. "The participation dividend of taxation: how citizens in Congo engage more with the state when it tries to tax them," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 104561, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    20. Daniel Benitez & Antonio Estache & Tina Søreide, 2012. "Infrastructure policy and governance failures," CMI Working Papers 5, CMI (Chr. Michelsen Institute), Bergen, Norway.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Rents; competition; corruption; bribery; public works Higher-Order Approximation;
    All these keywords.

    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:ngi:dpaper:24-10. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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/gripsjp.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.