Publication: Misunderestimating Corruption
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Date
2016
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Published
2016
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Murrell, Peter
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Corruption estimates rely largely on self-reports of affected individuals and officials. Yet, survey respondents are often reticent to tell the truth about sensitive subjects, leading to downward biases in survey-based corruption estimates. This paper develops a method to estimate the prevalence of reticent behavior and reticence-adjusted rates of corruption using survey responses to sensitive questions. A statistical model captures how respondents answer a combination of conventional and random-response questions, allowing identification of the effect of reticence. GMM and maximum-likelihood estimates are obtained for ten countries. Adjusting for reticence dramatically alters the perceptions of the extent of corruption.
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Publication Misunderestimating Corruption(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-05)Estimates of the extent of corruption rely largely on self-reports of individuals, business managers, and government officials. Yet it is well known that survey respondents are reticent to tell the truth about activities to which social and legal stigma are attached, implying a downward bias in survey-based estimates of corruption. This paper develops a method to estimate the prevalence of reticent behavior, in order to isolate rates of corruption that fully reflect respondent reticence in answering sensitive questions. The method is based on a statistical model of how respondents behave when answering a combination of conventional and random-response survey questions. The responses to these different types of questions reflect three probabilities -- that the respondent has done the sensitive act in question, that the respondent exhibits reticence in answering sensitive questions, and that a reticent respondent is not candid in answering any specific sensitive question. These probabilities can be estimated using a method-of-moments estimator. Evidence from the 2010 World Bank Enterprise survey in Peru suggests reticence-adjusted estimates of corruption that are roughly twice as large as indicated by responses to standard questions. Reticence-adjusted estimates of corruption are also substantially higher in a set of ten Asian countries covered in the Gallup World Poll.Publication Does Respondent Reticence Affect the Results of Corruption Surveys? Evidence from the World Bank Enterprise Survey for Nigeria(2010-09-01)A potential concern with survey-based data on corruption is that respondents may not be fully candid in their responses to sensitive questions. If reticent respondents are less likely to admit to involvement in corrupt acts, and if the proportion of reticent respondents varies across groups of interest, comparisons of reported corruption across those groups can be misleading. This paper implements a variant on random response techniques that allows for identification of reticent respondents in the World Bank s Enterprise Survey for Nigeria fielded in 2008 and 2009. 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This paper considers two alternative models of how reticence affects responses to two-step questions, with differing assumptions on how reticence affects the first question about visits. Maximum-likelihood estimates are obtained for seven countries using data on interactions with tax officials. Different models work best in different countries, but cross-country comparisons are still valid because both models use the same structural parameters. On average, 40 percent of corruption questions are answered reticently, with much variation across countries. A statistic reflecting how much standard measures underestimate the proportion of all respondents who had a bribe interaction is developed. The downward bias in standard measures is highly statistically significant in all countries, varying from 12 percent in Nigeria to 90 percent in Turkey. 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This suggests an important channel through which corruption can inhibit development by eroding confidence in public institutions. This correlation is robust to the inclusion of a large set of controls for country and respondent-level characteristics, and they show how it can plausibly be interpreted as reflecting at least in part a causal effect from corruption to confidence. The authors also show that individuals with low confidence in institutions exhibit low levels of political participation, show increased tolerance for violent means to achieve political ends, and have a greater desire to "vote with their feet" through emigration.
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