Publication: Corruption in Public Service Delivery : An Experimental Analysis
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Date
2009
ISSN
01672681
Published
2009
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To improve our understanding of corruption in service delivery, we use a newly designed game that allows us to investigate the effects of the institutional environment on the behavior of service providers and their monitors. We focus on the effect of four different factors: whether monitors are accountable to the service recipients, the degree of observability of service providers' effort, the providers' wages and the providers' professional norms. In accordance with theory, we find that service providers perform better when monitors are elected by service recipients and when their effort is more easily observed. However, there is only weak evidence that service providers perform better when paid more. Monitors are more vigilant when elected and when service providers are paid more. Playing the game with Ethiopian nursing students, we also find that those with greater exposure to the Ethiopian public health sector perform less well, either as provider or as monitor, when the experiment is framed as a public health provision scenario, suggesting that experience and norms affect behavior.
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Publication To Serve the Community or Oneself: The Public Servant's Dilemma(World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2004-01)Embezzlement of resources is hampering public service delivery throughout the developing world. Research on this issue is hindered by problems of measurement. To overcome these problems, the authors use an economic experiment to investigate the determinants of corrupt behavior. They focus on three aspects of behavior: 1) Embezzling by public servants. 2) Monitoring effort by designated monitors. 3) Voting by community members when provided with an opportunity to select a monitor. The experiment allows the authors to study the effect of wages, effort observance, rules for monitor assignment, and professional norms. Their experimental subjects are Ethiopian nursing students. The authors find that service providers who earn more embezzle less, although the effect is small. 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This suggests that different types of experimental subjects respond differently to the framing, possibly because they adhere to different norms.Publication For Public Service or Money : Understanding Geographical Imbalances in the Health Workforce(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2005-08)Geographical imbalances in the health workforce have been a consistent feature of nearly all health systems, especially in developing countries. The authors investigate the willingness to work in a rural area among final year nursing and medical students in Ethiopia. Analyzing data obtained from contingent valuation questions, they find that household consumption and the student's motivation to help the poor, which is their proxy for intrinsic motivation, are the main determinants of willingness to work in a rural area. The authors investigate who are willing to help the poor and find that women are significantly more likely to help than men. Other variables, including a rich set of psycho-social characteristics, are not significant. Finally, the authors carry out some simulations on how much it would cost to make the entire cohort of starting nurses and doctors choose to take up a rural post.Publication Subject Pool Effects in a Corruption Experiment: A Comparison of Indonesian Public Servants and Indonesian Students(2009)We report results from a corruption experiment with Indonesian public servants and Indonesian students. Our results suggest that the Indonesian public servant subjects have a significantly lower tolerance of corruption than the Indonesian students. We find no evidence that this is due to a selection effect. The reasons given by the subjects for their behaviour suggest that the differences in behavior across the subject pools are driven by their different real life experiences. For example, when abstaining from corruption, public servants more often cite the need to reduce the social costs of corruption as a reason for their actions, and when engaging in corruption, they cite low government salaries or a belief that corruption is a necessary evil in the current environment. In contrast, students give more simplistic moral reasons. We conclude by emphasizing that results obtained from different subject pools can complement each other in illuminating different aspects of the same problem.Publication Income Shocks and Corruption in Africa : Does a Virtuous Cycle Exist?(2011)Empirical evidence suggests that governance quality is a key driver of economic growth and that, in turn, higher incomes might have a positive causal effect on the quality of governance. Such complementarity could invite virtuous cycles of development. Using a measure of corruption as our proxy for the quality of governance, and rainfall as an instrument for income, we explore this issue and find evidence to the contrary. For a panel of African countries, positive income shocks on average tend to invite extra corruption. Closer inspection, however, reveals that this result can be attributed to the most corrupt countries. Conversely, countries with a sufficiently low level of corruption can escape the detrimental effect of income booms on corruption and may actually experience a virtuous cycle of development.Publication Corruption and Concession Renegotiations : Evidence from the Water and Transport Sectors in Latin America(2009)Numerous renegotiations have plagued water and transport concession contracts in Latin America. Using a panel dataset of over 300 concession contracts from Latin America between 1989 and 2000, we show that country-level corruption is a significant determinant of these renegotiations and that the effect of corruption varies depending on the type of renegotiations considered. While a more corrupt environment clearly leads to more firm-led renegotiations, it significantly reduces the incidence of government-led ones. The paper then discusses and tests the likely channels through which these different effects of corruption arise, looking in particular at the interactions between country-level corruption and relevant microeconomic institutions.
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