WHETHER the miscreants are African policemen, European politicians or American university basketball players, the same remedy for corrupt behaviour is offered: pay people more money. It sounds intuitive. But does legitimate lucre really drive out the filthy kind? New research involving a natural experiment in West Africa suggests that it does not—and that conventional economic theories of corruption are wrong.
In 2010 Ghana began to move public officials to a new salary structure. The earliest and biggest beneficiaries were police officers, whose pay abruptly doubled. It was hoped that they would start behaving better as a result—and especially that they would stop extorting money from drivers at roadblocks. There was certainly much room for improvement: surveys around that time by Transparency International, a watchdog, found that 91% of Ghanaians believed their police were corrupt, an even higher proportion than thought the same of politicians.
As it happened, a large survey was already under way of lorry drivers plying the roads of Ghana and its neighbour, Burkina Faso. Drivers with their papers in order were asked to record how many times they were stopped and how much money they paid to police and customs officials along the route.
Two American economists, Jeremy Foltz and Kweku Opoku-Agyemang, have examined the data on 2,100 long-haul...Continue reading
Source: Business and finance http://ift.tt/1OZZU2c
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