Corrupt Government Officials Research Articles

Optimal fiscal and monetary policy in a model with government corruption

This paper builds a theoretical model where corrupt government officials select the optimal amount of government spending directed toward building wealth for themselves and political allies. We refer to this type of government expenditures as rent extraction spending. Our results show that more government corruption leads to higher rent extraction spending, increased inflation, additional taxation, and lower non-rent extraction spending. The increases in inflation and rent extraction spending, however, are more muted when the corrupt country is a member of a currency union.

A Critical Examination of the Legal Standards for the Exploitation of Timber Resources: Encumbrances and Prospects for Forest Sustainability in Cameroon

The forest of Cameroon which is located in western equatorial Africa is central to economic growth and development and livelihood sustainability. Forests play three important functions: They provide habitat for the preservation of biodiversity; act as carbon sinks; and contribute to maintaining and enhancing the quality of the soil. Furthermore, forest is a source for nutrition and generates income for the state. Recently the demand for forest products by loggers and other forest users for the production of timber, fuel wood, and charcoal have been on the rise. Illegalities in the forest sector is fast becoming worrisome with incidents of illegal logging at the forefront and visible on every angle, beginning with illegal loggers to the corrupt government officials. Illegal logging is a chain of activities, beginning with the unclear allocation of concession rights, inappropriate felling of wood, transportation and marketing of the illegally exploited wood. The major cause of this has led to over exploitation of the forest in order to meet local and international demands. This further has an adverse effect on the forest as species are gradually disappearing, a change of climate, pollution, soil depletion, and a breach of local community’s right to forest. To this respect, our objective is to analyze the legislative instruments and their consistency or efficacy in regulating logging activities, and the encumbrances faced. To achieve these objectives we made use of both doctrinal and analytical research methodology with primary and secondary sources of information as the main tools. We observed that, the forest is under serious threat from adverse human activities, especially illegal logging encourage by factors such as corruption, ineffective forest legislations, and lack of consistency amongst others. In the light of the above mentioned huddles we proffered some recommendations such as beefing up enforcement procedure, minimizing corruption, an increase in the sanction against defaulters, reducing the procedure to obtain exploitation permit, reforming, harmonization and codification of the forest law which will serve as a way forward.

BEYOND CONVENTIONAL BOUNDARIES

According to conventional wisdom, organized criminal activity is perpetrated primarily by non‐state, private actors who are occasionally [or not] protected by corrupt government officials. From this perspective, a hard distinction is made between those who provide protection to criminals (e.g., politicians or law enforcement officials) and the criminals themselves (e.g., smugglers or producers of counterfeit goods). It further treats the involvement of state‐affiliated actors as a by‐product of corruption in public office, rather than, in some places, a feature of it. This article builds on emerging evidence that state representatives play a far more direct role in supervising, organizing and sometimes managing crime than assumed in the majority of the literature. It shows that there are inherent theoretical, policy‐level biases that misguide the analytical thinking about organized crime in the Global South, and argues that there is a need to reconsider existing approaches to develop more accommodative definitions of organized crime.

Du sang et des larmes par Mohamed Condé

Reviewed by: Du sang et des larmes par Mohamed Condé Deborah Gaensbauer CondÉ, Mohamed. Du sang et des larmes. L'Harmattan, 2022. ISBN 978-2-14-027691-0. Pp. 162. This highly political story of a young boy, Sima, who survives acute childhood leukemia to become a contested leader of a Guinean opposition party, reflects the complexity of the author's syncretic Muslim and Malinke background and his broad involvement as an educator, journalist, and government official in Guinea's turbulent politics. Condé's revised edition of his first published novel augments the meticulous cultural, political, and topographical details that contextualize a very broad spectrum of events and relationships, further enhancing its distinct pedagogical value. The first of the novel's three sections, focalized principally through the perceptions of the seven-year-old Sima's father, Madu, depicts with moving attunement to parental anguish the crucial role of tradition and community in Guinean society. Vacillating between revolt and resignation and ambivalent recourse to spiritualism and herbal remedies as well as mainstream medical practices, Madu struggles for roughly a year to obtain a visa permitting Sima's hospitalization in Paris. Emphasis on the obstacles to Madu's quest posed by bureaucracy in Conakry and distrustful French immigration policies serves to introduce the numerous analyses and critiques of clandestine migration that figure as a primary binding theme in the novel. Intensifying critiques of post-independence Guinea in the second and third sections increasingly inflect the story with a didactic political emphasis. Recovered from leukemia in the second section, thanks to extraordinary familial devotion and combined interventions of traditional African healers and French oncologists, Sima becomes immersed in a community of Guinean expatriates in Paris. Condé relays their dissident conversations at length, mobilizing what is a recurrent and sometimes artistically artificial device to incorporate analyses and background material that would otherwise fall outside the immediate development of the narrative. In the most significant change made to the 2022 edition, Condé eliminates this kind of dramatic tension-breaking elaboration to powerful effect at the end of the novel. Sima, having somewhat naively risked accepting the post of Guinean prime minister, is assassinated just as he believes he is about to succeed in imposing democratic reforms. "La soif du pouvoir de l'homme est plus cruelle que le cancer" (159). This reaction from a witness concludes both editions but with significantly different contextualization. In the first edition, a moralizing commentary on Guinean politics prefaces the remark, clearly distinguishing corrupt government officials from the visionary Sima. In the revised version, the comment is not elaborated. Couched in a fraught ambiguity, it becomes interpretable as a warning generalizable to all political ambitions. The novel's multiple exhortations to young Guineans to resist migration and draw strength from what Condé represents as a uniquely African sense of community are thus complicated by a stark acknowledgement of risks inherent in [End Page 228] fighting for life-sustaining conditions in present-day Guinea. (Between the two versions, Condé was abruptly dismissed from his position as Secretary General of the Ministry of Information and Communication.) Written from a perspective as critical of contemporary Guinea as it is of Western cultural and economic hegemony, Du sang et des larmes is a politically courageous and disturbing portrayal of the fragility of democracy. [End Page 229] Deborah Gaensbauer Regis University (CO), emerita Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French

Trading integrity for competence? The public's varying preferences for bureaucratic types across government levels in China

AbstractPeople's willingness to forgive corrupt government officials has intrigued many researchers. According to a prominent explanation, citizens tolerate corrupt officials in exchange for their ability to deliver public benefits, such as promoting economic development. We contextualize this corruption–competence tradeoff thesis by assessing individuals' evaluations of local officials in China. We conduct a nationwide vignette experiment with 5527 citizens, and find that the corruption–competence tradeoff exists and is hierarchical. Respondents prefer competent but corrupt low-level officials over those who are honest but incompetent, but this relative preference vanishes when they evaluate high-level local officials. Our interviews reveal that proximity to citizens and position in the power hierarchy primarily drive citizens' sophisticated assessments of officials at different levels.

Društvena uloga Policijskog glasnika i pojava crne hronike u Srbiji

In this paper, the social and security history of Serbia at the end of the 19th century is analyzed through an overview of the emergence, survival and functioning of the police press as a newspaper intended for the general public, but also as a significant means of shaping political culture and a stable environment. The appearance of the first issue of the Police Herald at the end of 1897 marked the strengthening of the class organization of this service, but also the growing influence and reputation in the society of that time. Although they represented a social-class and professional magazine, the editors (who were also policemen and journalists) made significant professional progress with their responsible, engaged and mobilizing approach on the border of literary and journalistic style, becoming visible in the international environment as well. Their main goal was to educate and train both members of the police and supporting administration, as well as the entire public in order to act preventively against the increasingly noticeable spread of numerous pathological phenomena. The culture of reading the press could not spread as fast as the desire for social change, but the skill of marketing content that talked about thieves, swindlers, bandits, murderers, corrupt government representatives, poisoners and similar actors of deviant phenomena, without sensationalism, manipulation and glorification of such persons was stunning. The Police Newsletter was published intermittently until 1944 (first stage 1897-1914; second stage 1920-1944). The affirmative and propaganda-activist purpose of the newspaper is visible in the intention to bring biographies and results of police officers, including their photos, to the public. More than 5.000 pictures of hardened criminals have been published against whom proceedings were conducted and who threatened the society in any way, while the number of texts related to the local crime was over 12,000. Their characteristic is the literary-publicistic style of narration, which brings criminal investigations and topics closer to a wider audience. Because of the simple, vernacular language and interesting storytelling, the readership was very high for that time. With a mild, informal and friendlier approach, the Police Herald built a bridge of trust with the community, expanding the reputation of the police and its employees, while simultaneously changing social awareness of corruption, crime and other pathological phenomena. This clearly shows the educational and professional mission of the newspaper, which, by scripting deviant behavior, strives to change the patriarchal consciousness of the Serbian public, especially doing everything to transform the behavior of persons from the criminal sphere. The narrativization of reality extends and strengthens the regulative influence of the police service and legal procedures, because through the discourse of local crime reports, social practices are legitimized in the social order in which they function. The processes of symbolic changes are complex and ambiguous, but as the content of newspapers became more interesting and explosive, so did the number of readers. The Newsletter reveals the then-unknown stories about thieves, swindlers, bandits, murderers, corrupt government officials, the sins of government officials... but at the same time it teaches the people how to oppose them or help the police to arrest them. The class-oriented editorial structure and genre hierarchy of news and reports, with a focus on the contents of the local crime reports, only increased the interest of public opinion in the operation of police services, but also the role and status of police officers and their relationship with the state and citizens. Even then, stories and records from the world of crime significantly stimulated the public's attention to the newspapers that publish them, at the same time empowering and creating a mobile audience core ready to responsibly and courageously oppose various forms of deviant behavior. Conservativism was at least temporarily pushed aside, so it can be said that the Police Herald at the crossroads of the 19th and 20th centuries represented the initiator of security reforms and new winds in the stagnant and blurred atmosphere of political confrontations and conflicts among parties of the time.

Critical Studies of the Land Mafia Practices: Evidence in Indonesia

This study aims to present an overview of land mafia practices in Indonesia which raises problems of land cases, land dispute conflicts that lead to Staat Van Oorlog en Beleg (SOB) or a state of emergency. The actions and modus operandi of the land mafia in Indonesia are carried out both individually and in groups based on bad intentions involving politicians, criminals, property traders and corrupt government officials. The research methodology used is normative law with a qualitative analysis approach. This document uses primary, secondary and tertiary legal data which is processed from scientific contributions published in research academic databases. This scientific contribution concludes that it is hoped that the problem of land disputes in Indonesia can be resolved properly and amicably. It is hoped that a comprehensive study that includes the government can be carried out as soon as possible so that the problem of land disputes due to land mafia actions does not have the potential to spread and be resolved properly and correctly. Land dispute resolution mechanisms can be resolved by the government by adopting settlements carried out by professional parking authorities. This basic reason is a manifestation of the rights and responsibilities of each party. This study is of interest to the government and legislators, academics and land observers to address SOB related to land mafia practices in Indonesia as a crime in the land sector.

Implications of public corruption for local firms: Evidence from corporate debt maturity

Using political corruption conviction data from the U.S. Department of Justice, we examine the impact of local corruption on firms’ debt maturity structure while exploring both demand-side and supply-side explanations. Our results support the demand-side story and indicate that firms in high corruption areas utilize less short-term debt to mitigate liquidity and refinancing risks. Consistent with this, we find the effect is more pronounced among firms with smaller size, lower asset redeployability, and higher volatility. Our findings remain robust to the inclusion of an array of controls expected to influence debt maturity preferences as well as time, industry, and state fixed effects. Moreover, a seemingly unrelated regression approach, instrumental variables regression, propensity score matching, placebo analyses, and alternative corruption measures corroborate our findings. Altogether, our results indicate that firms alter their debt maturity choices in response to local corruption to limit refinancing risk and the uncertainty created by corrupt government officials.

Corruption Accusations and Bureaucratic Performance: Evidence from Pakistan

Abstract This study assesses the effectiveness of anti-corruption policies of Pakistan by relating the corruption of government officials to the actual and perceived bureaucratic hurdles faced by formal businesses. It offers a unique perspective by focusing on cases in which the accused officers voluntarily disclosed the misuse of public money (or gains acquired through corruption) in order to avail the option of plea-bargaining. The empirical analysis estimates the effect of these policies on the responses of the managers of business firms in Enterprise Surveys. The number of accusations seems to reduce the incidence of bureaucratic corruption. While the amount that is being offered in bargaining has a negative effect overall, it switches sign overtime suggesting the possibility that it may increase corruption in the long run. The core results are robust across various measures of firm-level corruption. The instrumental variable estimates produce similar results.

Is bribing a good strategy? Imbalanced interdependence and hazard of opportunism in bribery

PurposeIn fragile institutional environments, firms often have no choice but bribery as the means to access the services monopolized by the government. Corrupt government officials whose resources are valuable to many different firms can easily find other firms willing to offer bribes. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether and how this imbalanced interdependence exposes the bribing firm to the hazard of opportunism from the bribed officials.Design/methodology/approachThis study draws on World Business Environment Survey (WBES) data and the instrumental variable (IV) Probit estimator with Heckman correction for the potential selection bias.FindingsThe authors find that the more firms depend on bribery to acquire governmental resources, the severer the level of opportunism they encounter from the government officials. In addition, the authors find that although the presence of a legal alternative to bribery reduces the level of a corrupt government official's opportunism that a bribing firm experiences, the more firms depend on bribery despite the presence of a legal alternative, the higher the level of the corrupt official's opportunism that the firm will experience. Finally, the authors find that establishing a relational contract with government officials reduces the hazard of opportunism.Originality/valueThe study contributes to the resource dependence literature by finding that a greater imbalance in the interdependence between two parties in bribery exposes the more dependent party to a larger hazard of opportunism. The finding that an ineffective alternative to a current resource provider would not strengthen but weaken a resource seeker's bargaining power expands the literature. The authors also contribute to the corruption research by showing the significant strategic, not legal, risk to bribing firms of engaging in bribery, which to date has not been sufficiently discussed.

Uncertainties and trends in the forest policy framework in Sierra Leone: an overview of forest sustainability challenges in the post-independence era

Sierr a Leone is part of the Upper Guinean Forests with a climate that enhances great floral biodiversity. The exploitation of forest resources in Sierra Leone has seen a steady increase over the years while the establishment of forest plantations has witnessed a drastic decline. The relationship between forest exploitation and plantation forest decline is broadly assumed to be influenced by population growth, weak forest policies, legislatures, forest management and monitoring policies over the past century. The paper examines forests status and forest resources policy evolution since the pre-colonial era but pays particular attention to policies developed from 1988, in the post-colonial era, and the challenges facing their implementation. The paper highlights major challenges facing the healthy and sustainable growth of forest resources in Sierra Leone. The challenges range from the attachment of the Forestry Division to the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Food Security (MAFFS), the overlap in ministerial mandates about forest protection, corrupt government officials, poverty, illegal logging, inadequate funding and staff, natural disaster and outdated forestry instruments. Natural factors such as climate change, drought, and landslides are considered among the issues affecting the sustainable expansion of forest resources in Sierra Leone. A flowchart of forest sustainability challenges in Sierra Leone was designed, and classified forest challenges into natural and man-made causes. The inability of the Forestry Division to become an independent body and the continued reliance of the Division on the 1988 Forestry Act to make informed decisions in the 21st century is serving as a major barrier in sustaining forests resources in Sierra Leone. Improving forest management in the country requires the collective efforts of both national and international forests protections entities and organizations. Sound forests conservation policies and adequate funding and staffing can strengthen the Forestry Division in enforcing its constitutional mandates. Adopting the best practices models from countries such as China, India and the USA will help towards the goal of managing forest resources sustainably for current and future generations.

Implications of Public Corruption for Local Firms: Evidence from Corporate Debt Maturity

Using political corruption conviction data from the U.S. Department of Justice, we examine the impact of local corruption on firms’ debt maturity structure while exploring both demand-side and supply-side explanations. Our results support the demand-side story and indicate that firms located in high corruption areas utilize less short-term debt to mitigate liquidity and refinancing risks. Consistent with this, we find the effect is more pronounced among firms with smaller size, lower asset redeployability, and higher volatility. Our findings remain robust to the inclusion of an array of controls expected to influence debt maturity preferences as well as time, industry, and state fixed effects. Moreover, a seemingly unrelated regression approach, instrumental variables regression, propensity score matching, and placebo analyses corroborate our findings. Altogether, our results indicate that firms alter their debt maturity choices in response to local corruption to limit refinancing risk and the uncertainty created by corrupt government officials.

Nutrition Intake, Health Status, Education and Economic Growth: A Causality Investigation

Abstract This paper examines the causal relationship between nutrition intake, health status, education and economic growth within a six-variate VEC framework, forecast error variance decomposition and impulse response function techniques, covering the period from 1990 to 2013, using quarterly data in Nigeria. This paper includes control variables in order to eliminate variable omission bias, unlike most existing studies. The results suggest the presence of long-run, bicausal relationships between the candidate variables of the study. In addition, the short-run unidirectional causal relationships are found between main variables, including a causal relationship running from nutrition and fiscal policy to education, as well as a causal link running from education and economic growth to health status. These findings support the existing theories. The results based on the model and empirical data suggest that the government should allocate more resources to human development in order to enhance productivity and boost economic growth. Similarly, there is a need to design adequate mechanisms to ensure proper allocation of the limited resources and avoid their embezzlement by corrupt government officials.

A Blockchain and Edge-Computing-Based Secure Framework for Government Tender Allocation

Governments and public sector entities around the world are actively exploring new ways to keep up with technological advancements to achieve smart governance, work efficiency, and cost optimization. Blockchain technology is an example of such technology that has been attracting the attention of Governments across the globe in recent years. Enhanced security, improved traceability, and lowest cost infrastructure empower the blockchain to penetrate various domains. Generally, governments release tenders to some third-party organizations for different projects. During this process, different competitors try to eavesdrop the tender values of others to win the tender. The corrupt government officials also charge high bribe to pass the tender in favor of some particular third party. In this article, we presented a secure and transparent framework for government tenders using blockchain. Blockchain is used as a secure and immutable data structure to store the government records that are highly susceptible to tampering. This work aims to create a transparent and secure edge computing infrastructure for the workflow in government tenders to implement government schemes and policies by limiting human supervision to the minimal.

Political corruption and annual report readability: evidence from the United States

This study examines the association between the political corruption of a local government and the readability of firms’ annual reports. Based on a sample of 12,742 firm-year observations during the 2006–2014 period, the study reveals that firms located in more corrupt regions tend to disclose less readable financial reports. Our additional analyses reveal that the level of annual report readability is lower for firms located in more corrupt regions, regardless of the firms’ level of return on assets. We also find that firms located in more corrupt regions and having more able managers are more likely to obfuscate information in annual reports. The results imply firms’ effort to minimise rent extraction from corrupt government officials. A further test shows that firms in more corrupt regions are more likely to report less readable Management Discussion and Analysis (MD&A) section of annual reports. This paper extends the prior literature on annual report readability and political corruption. The paper also provides additional evidence to the mixed results on the management's obfuscation behaviour related to the readability of financial disclosures. The findings may be of interest to regulators seeking out factors influencing firms’ readability of annual reports.

I Know What I Need: Optimization of Bribery

Corruption has been a major obstacle to economic growth around the world. In this paper, we examine how firms interact with corrupt government officials either to minimize the impact of corruption on their operations or to maximize their benefit of paying a bribe. Our estimates show that firms know exactly what they need and use their limited resources to bribe only relevant government authorities. In other words, firms are rational bribers who know exactly what they need and optimize their bribes to fulfill that need. This type of intentional bribery could be reduced by enhanced institutional environments and improved openness of the economy.

El método de la prueba indiciaria, aplicable para la valoración de indicios y la prueba directa en las sentencias sobre delitos de concusión (colusión), peculado y corrupción de funcionarios (cohecho)

Luego de culminado el juicio oral, en los delitos de concusión (colusión), peculado y corrupción de funcionarios (cohecho) frecuentemente no existe prueba directa. La «prueba indiciaria» debe valorarse utilizando el «principio de sana crítica», desarrollando los elementos de esta: a) la lógica, con sus principios de identidad, contradicción, razón suficiente, tercero excluido; b) las máximas de la experiencia (criterios normativos o reglas no jurídicas); c) conocimientos científicamente aceptados.El método de valoración de la prueba indiciaria implica utilizar la «inferencia deductiva», lo cual es adecuado. Este «método de valoración de la prueba indiciaria» debe aplicarse a la valoración de la «prueba directa», por ser más eficaz, para acercarnos a la verdad.

Profiting from illegality: A discursive analysis of the chainsaw operation in rural Ghana

Chainsaw milling has in recent times gained currency in public discourse in Ghana. Governments over the years have tried to curtail the activity but such attempts have always met strong resistance from the locals who engage in the operation as a means of livelihood. A critical analysis of the industry is necessary for a sustainable livelihood development. This paper, through empirical research, uses discourse analysis to examine the politics of chainsaw operation in Ghana, focusing on what push locals into it in spite of attempts to curb it. Our findings indicate that for most people, unemployment, corrupt government officials, lack of agricultural lands and inadequate policy response to domestic timber demand are the reasons for getting into the industry. However, the rules and regulations as well as the monitoring regimes, coupled with complex ambiguous relationships between state agencies, large-scale lumber and milling companies, traditional authorities and chainsaw operators, together entrench chainsaw activities in the country. Our findings provide a different approach to state agencies' discourse on chainsaw dominated by buccaneering and criminalisation narratives in Ghana. Rather than the antagonistic tactic towards the chainsaw phenomenon by the Forestry Commission and other state bureaucracies, they could initiate policy and legislative reforms to help tidy up the chainsaw operations in Ghana.

Impacts Of Deforestation On Socio-Economic Development And Environment In Nigeria

Deforestation enables the earth soil to run off into sources of water supply due to the absence of tree roots to absorb water thereby causing water pollution. Absence of tree roots further deprives the soil of important nutrients necessary for the growth of new vegetation. Through deforestation, more carbon is released into the atmosphere, climatic changes take place and soil is exposed to rainfalls thus promoting erosions. These are not without serious health implications. The trade of wood products is an obvious source of substantial income for national and local governments as well as traditional rulers and individuals. This often comes in the form of export earnings, taxes, royalties and personal income for those engaged either directly or indirectly in the exploitation of these forest products. Qualitative secondary sources of data collection were used for this paper. Amongst other recommendations, it is recommended that Corrupt government officials in charge of forestry laws and policies should be prosecuted together with illegal loggers, environmental education should be accorded to the general public on the dire consequences of deforestation on people and the society at large, skills acquisition program should be organized for rural women dwellers and the uneducated youths in order to curtail the rate of deforestation.

The Economic Impact of Malaysia’s Institution on the Failure of the Wawasan 2020

On the arrival of 2020, Malaysian President Mahathir officially announced the failure of Wawasan 2020, which is also called Vision 2020. This article discusses the cause of this failure from the perspective of institutional issues, namely political struggle, institutional corruption, supreme Malay policy. At the same time, this article puts forward the following opinions for the future economic development of Malaysia because of the above issues. The first thing to govern is the corruption of government officials and the corruption of the system. Secondly, the government should improve its unfair education system and reduce the drain of Chinese talents. Taking the Korean economy as an example, Malaysia can achieve a win-win situation with China through the Belt and Road Initiative.