Corruption accounting and growth: towards a new methodology

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate empirically that corruption causes significant and sizeable macroeconomic costs to countries in terms of economic activity and economic growth. The authors modeled corruption building on the endogenous growth literature and finally estimated the baseline (bribes paid to public officials) macroeconomic cost of corruption using Argentina 2004-2015 as a case study. Design/methodology/approach - The authors laid the foundations of a new methodology to account corruption losses using data from the national accounts and judiciary investigations within the framework of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) non-observed economy (NOE) instead of subjective indicators as in the earlier literature. They also suggested a new method to compute public expenditures overruns, including but not limited to public works. Findings - The authors found the costs stand at a minimum accumulated rate of 8 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) or 0.8 per cent yearly. These findings provided a corruption cost floor and were consistent with earlier research on world corruption losses estimated at 5 per cent by the World Economic Forum and with the losses estimated at between a yearly rate of 1.3 and 4 per cent and 2 per cent of GDP by Brazil and Peru’s corruption, respectively. Research limitations/implications - The authors would need to extend the application of their new suggested methodology to further countries. They are working on this. They would need to develop the methodology in full to compute the public works overruns input to future econometric work. Originality/value - In this paper, the authors make a threefold contribution to the literature on corruption and growth: first, they laid the foundations toward a new methodology to make an accounting of the corruption costs in terms of GDP consistent with the national accounts and executed budgets; on the one hand, and the OECD NOE framework, on the other. The authors named those corruption costs as percentage of GDP the “corruption wedge.” Second, they developed an example taking corruption events and a component of their total costs, namely, the bribes paid to public officials, taking Argentina 2004-2015 as a case study. Finally, they plugged the estimated wedge back into an endogenous growth model and calibrated the growth–corruption path simulating two economies where the total factor productivity was different, at different levels of the corruption wedge.