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To Serve The Community Or Oneself: The Public Servant'S Dilemma

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Author Info
Abigail Barr (Centre for the Study of African Economies)
Magnus Lindelow (The World Bank)
Pieter Serneels (University of Copenhagen)

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Abstract

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 we use an economic experiment to investigate the determinants of coorupt behaviour. We focus on three aspects of bahaviour; (i) embezzlement by public servants; (ii) monitoring effort by designated monitors; (iii)voting by community members when provided with an opportunity to select a monitor. The experiment allows us to study the effect of wages, effort observability, rules for monitor assignment, and professional norms. Our experimental subjects are Ethiopian nursing students. We find that service providers who earn more embezzle less, although the effect is small. Embezzlement is also lower when observability (associated with the risk of being caught and sanctioned) is high, and when sevice providers face an elected rather than randomly selected monitor. Monitors put more effort into monitoring, when they face re- election and when the public servant receives a higher wage. Communities re-elect monitors who put more effort into exposing embezzlement. Framing - whereby players are referred to as 'health workers' and 'community members' rather than by abstract labels - affects neither mean embezzlement nor mean monitoring effort, but significantly increases the variance in both. This suggests that different types of experimental subject respond differently to the framing, possibly because they adhere to different norms.

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Paper provided by EconWPA in its series Development and Comp Systems with number 0409035.

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Length: 32 pages
Date of creation: 23 Sep 2004
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Handle: RePEc:wpa:wuwpdc:0409035

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O - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth
P - Economic Systems

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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.)

  1. Klaus Abbink & Matthew Ellman, 2004. "The Donor Problem," Economics Working Papers 796, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, revised Jan 2005. [Downloadable!]
  2. Patricia Crifo & Jean-Louis Rullière, 2004. "Incentives and Anonymity Principle: Crowding Out Toward Users," CESifo Working Paper Series CESifo Working Paper No. , CESifo Group Munich. [Downloadable!]
  3. Olivier Armantier & Amadou Boly, 2008. "Can Corruption Be Studied in the Lab? Comparing a Field and a Lab Experiment," CIRANO Working Papers 2008s-26, CIRANO. [Downloadable!]
  4. Vivi Alatas & Lisa Cameron & Ananish Chaudhuri & Nisvan Erkal & Lata Gangadharan, 2006. "Subject Pool Effects in a Corruption Experiment: A Comparison of Indonesian Public Servants and Indonesian Students," Department of Economics - Working Papers Series 975, The University of Melbourne. [Downloadable!]
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  5. L. Cameron & A. Chaudhuri & N. Erkal & L. Gangadharan, 2005. "Do Attitudes Towards Corruption Differ Across Cultures? Experimental Evidence from Australia, India, Indonesia andSingapore," Department of Economics - Working Papers Series 943, The University of Melbourne. [Downloadable!]
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