This paper uses a randomized field experiment to examine several approaches to reducing corruption. I measure missing expenditures in over 600 village road projects in Indonesia by having engineers independently estimate the prices and quantities of all inputs used in each road, and then comparing these estimates to villages' official expenditure reports. I find that announcing an increased probability of a government audit, from a baseline of 4 percent to 100 percent, reduced missing expenditures by about 8 percentage points, more than enough to make these audits cost-effective. By contrast, I find that increasing grass-roots participation in the monitoring process only reduced missing wages, with no effect on missing materials expenditures. Since materials account for three-quarters of total expenditures, increasing grass-roots participation had little impact overall. The findings suggest that grass-roots monitoring may be subject to free-rider problems. Overall, the results suggest that traditional top-down monitoring can play an important role in reducing corruption, even in a highly corrupt environment.
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
11753.
Length: Date of creation: Nov 2005 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:11753
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Find related papers by JEL classification: D73 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Bureaucracy; Administrative Processes in Public Organizations; Corruption
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References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Shleifer, Andrei & Vishny, Robert W, 1993.
"Corruption,"
The Quarterly Journal of Economics,
MIT Press, vol. 108(3), pages 599-617, August.
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Andrei Shleifer & Robert W. Vishny, 1993.
"Corruption,"
NBER Working Papers
4372, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)
Björkman, Martina & Reinikka, Ritva & Svensson, Jakob, 2006.
"Local Accountability,"
Seminar Papers
749, Stockholm University, Institute for International Economic Studies.
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