Integrity for Hire: An Analysis of a Widespread Program for Combating Customs CorruptionNo 525, Working Papers from Research Seminar in International Economics, University of Michigan Abstract: Can governments successfully combat bureaucratic corruption by “hiring integrity” from the private sector? This paper examines the impact of hiring private firms to collect information for government anti-corruption efforts. In the past two decades, a number of developing countries have hired private firms to conduct preshipment inspections of imports, generating data that governments can use to fight corruption in customs agencies. I find that countries implementing such inspection programs subsequently experience large increases in the growth rate of import duties, by 6 to 8 percentage points annually. By contrast, the growth rate of other tax revenues does not change appreciably. Additional evidence suggests that declines in customs corruption are behind the import duty improvements: the programs also lead to increases in imports (potentially reflecting lower bribe payments) and to declines in mis-reporting of goods classifications. Historically, this hired integrity appears to have been cost-effective: accumulated improvements in import duty collections in the fifth year of a typical inspection program were roughly 5 times accumulated costs. Keywords: corruption; crime; bribery; enforcement; tax evasion; customs (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mie:wpaper:525 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Papers from Research Seminar in International Economics, University of Michigan Contact information at EDIRC. |
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