寻租腐败:一种经济学分析视角

腐败现象,从经济学的角度讲,其性质是一种寻租活动。“寻租”是指人类社会中追求非生产性经济利益的活动。寻租活动的危害主要有:权力的滥用和腐化;社会资源的巨大浪费;社会成员是非价值传统观和对政府合法性认同感的丧失。寻租从本质上说是权力寻租行为。在我国正处于向市场经济过渡的转轨时期,制度“真空”的存在是权力寻租的主要根源。因此,遏制寻租腐败源头的根本措施在于制度创新。     

Decentralization and Corruption: Evidence from U.S. Federal Transfer Programs

While some recent evidence suggests that more decentralizationis associated with reduced corruption, no empirical work hasexamined whether different types of decentralization havedifferential effects on corruption. The theoretical literaturehas emphasized that expenditure decentralization will only beeffective if accompanied by the devolution of revenuegeneration to local governments. In this paper we examine thishypothesis empirically, by studying the mismatch betweenrevenue generation and expenditure in U.S. states. Largerfederal transfers are associated with higher rates ofconviction for abuse of public office, supporting the theorythat soft-budget constraints created by federal transfers arepotentially problematic.     

Corruption: An Alternative Approach to Its Definition and Measurement

Discussion of the definition of corruption has progressed little since Heidenheimer's groundbreaking distinction between definitions centred on public opinion, public office and public interest. All these definitions have been severely criticised. I suggest that underneath these traditional concepts of corruption lurks a much older one based on distributive justice – namely the 'impartiality principle', whereby a state ought to treat equally those who deserve equally. This principle provides a much more plausible reason for why the public condemns corruption than alternative approaches, and, moreover, it is recognised fairly universally: the implicit distinction between 'public' and 'private' is certainly neither as 'modern' nor as 'Western' as many have claimed. The universality of the principle of impartiality does not imply universality of its content: who deserves equally, or, alternatively, on which grounds discrimination is ruled out, will be answered differently at different periods in time and will vary from society to society. The impartiality principle provides a starting point for the discussion of both corruption in 'traditional' societies and contemporary political corruption – corruption involving violations of specific non-discrimination norms governing the access to the political process and the allocation of rights and resources. The impartiality principle calls for rule-bound administration and thus underpins the public office definition of corruption. A central element of the analysis of corruption is the study of specific non-discrimination norms and their comparison across time and place. This approach leads to a significant enrichment of the concept of corruption.     

Corruption and Political Culture in America: An Empirical Perspective

Political culture helps define the boundaries of permissiblepolitical action. Thus, it should affect the amounts and typesof political corruption occurring in political systems, as wellas responses to corruption when it is discovered. This articlecompares the distribution of corruption convictions among federaljudicial districts over a three-year period to social and politicalcharacteristics of the districts, and to scaled measures ofElazar's moralistic, individualistic, and traditionalistic politicalsubcultures. Nationally, strong moralistic subcultures and highvoter turnouts are associated with numerous convictions, bothbefore and after district population is controlled. Analysisof regional patterns reveals a different model in the South,however, one suggesting ideas about the dynamics of traditionalisticpolitics. Corruption, and the impact of federal laws againstit, are best understood within their political and culturalsettings. ^* I am indebted to George Calafut and Philip Sidel of the SocialScience Computer Research Institute, University of Pittsburgh,who gave me many hours of assistance in assembling data. LeonardKuntz and William Nelson of the Universitys Office of Research,Father Bernard Quinn of the Glenmary Research Center, and WilliamNewman of the University of Connecticut helped me locate religiouscensus results. The County and City Data Book is published ontape by the Inter-University Consortium for Political and SocialResearch. Daniel J. Elazar, Michael Margolis, Bert A. Rockman,and two anonymous referees gave me extremely helpful commentson this study.     

Governance Structure and Administrative Corruption in Japan: An Organizational Network Approach

Traditional studies of the Japanese bureaucracy have emphasized effective governance through a close government–business nexus. Yet this network relation creates corruption, especially at a high level of administration. Adopting an organizational network approach, this article provides a critical analysis of the causality between network structures and administrative corruption. Examining financial and public works policies, this article finds that amakudari- and zoku-driven network relationships, which have been reinforced by sociocultural bases, are vertically and exclusively structured and substantiate corruption in administration. Policy making on the basis of such network relations not only results in mismanagement in administration and the distortion of the market disciplines but also delegitimizes the governance system by destroying public trust in government. This article suggests that bringing greater heterogeneity and citizen participation to administration through diversity management and e-government would reduce administrative corruption in Japanese governance.     

Tackling Corruption at its Source: The National Corruption Prevention Bureau

In Spring 2007 as part of its ongoing anticorruption efforts, the PRC announced the establishment of a new organization called the “National Corruption Prevention Bureau” (NCPB). The article first examines the origins of the NCPB and its position in the current Chinese anticorruption regime. The NCPB will concentrate primarily on information collection and coordination work. Given these goals, This article examines the organization’s potential for improving work in three areas related to information collection and coordination; increased oversight of the private sector, improving information quality and dissemination, and strengthening routine anticorruption activities. The final section examines potential problems that will likely limit the ability of this new organization to improve anticorruption work, such as the possibility of increasing complexity within the anticorruption system, and the NCPB’s limited independence from the agencies it seeks to coordinate.

政府部门谋位型腐败的经济学分析

分析了我国政府部门由职务变动引发的腐败问题。在我国市场经济尚未完全建立的现状之下,含有经济租金的一些政府部门职位成为一些人追逐的目标,加上目前我国政府部门的晋升制度还不够完善、政府组织的职位派生能力有限、政府组织与官员个人在实际工作能力和工作绩效方面存在着信息不对称、在补偿机制方面政府职位与经济福利待遇联系紧密等,为以谋取政府职务为目标的腐败行为提供了条件。谋位型腐败同时还成为引发谋利型腐败的一个重要根源。采用经济学研究方法,将谋位型腐败与谋利型腐败糅合在一个模型中加以分析,得出了如下一些结论:谋位型腐败发生的概率与参与同一职位竞争的人数负相关;工作能力弱的备选人相对于工作能力强的备选人更加倾向于采用行贿的手段谋取职务晋升;在两个备选人的工作能力和绩效相当的情况下,谋位型腐败发生的概率上升;谋位者个人、特别是握有人事安排决策权的部门负责人的腐败倾向性是谋位型腐败发生的关键因素;不同职位之间的经济收入差距越大,越易引发谋位型腐败。根据上述结论,提出了相应的政策建议。     

Sleaze, Old Corruption and Parliamentary Reform: An Historical Perspective on the Current Crisis

There is nothing new about the existence of a political class, nor about the electorate's distaste for paid politicians. In the middle ages, voters made clear their preference for representatives who were prepared to serve without payment; in the eighteenth century, the increase in the number of MPs paid by the state, whether in salaried posts or as sinecurists, was seen as a corrupt and pernicious extension to the influence of the crown; in the nineteenth and early twentieth century the payment of MPs by the taxpayer was widely regarded as an improper and offensive idea. The current furore over MPs' pay and expenses is another example of the intense suspicion with which MPs who have received money from the state have been regarded from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.     

Regulation of Speech and Media Coverage of Corruption: An Empirical Analysis of the Mexican Press

Restrictions to media freedom, in the form of repressive defamation legislation, are thought to affect the amount of information about corruption that the media report. Exploiting variation in regulation of speech across states in a federal country, Mexico, and using a novel data set based on content analysis of the local press, I estimate the effect of lack of freedom on the coverage devoted to acts of malfeasance by public officials. Corruption receives significantly less attention in states with a more repressive defamation law. Instrumental variable models corroborate the interpretation of the negative association between regulation and coverage as a causal “chilling effect.”     

Policy Transfer among Local Governments: An Information–Theory Approach

We argue that the burgeoning literature on policy transfer suffers from the lack of an analytical framework that would facilitate understanding and, thus, theory–building. We suggest that policy transfer be conceptualized as occurring through a communications and information framework and that it focus on information networks that include producers, senders, and facilitators of information, as well as recipients. We apply this framework to an illustrative study of how British local–authority officials involved in the area of urban regeneration policy learn from each other's experience.
Utilizing this approach, the results of our case study yield several testable hypotheses for future study. In particular, they direct us towards the importance of informal networks in the policy–transfer process, towards an examination of the motivations of producers, senders, and disseminators of information, and towards the difficulty all participants in the network have in assessing the quality and validity of the information they receive.     

诱发腐败的相对剥夺心理:分析与比较

公职人员腐败诱发的社会心理随着经济社会的发展而变化.在经济增长迟缓的发展中国家,福利价值的相对剥夺是公职人员腐败的主要诱因;在一国的经济高速增长阶段和转型社会,获取财富的多寡容易成为衡量权力价值的主要尺度;在发达国家和地区,诱发腐败的动机则主要在于时权力本身的地位、荣誉和影响力的追逐.处于不同发展阶段的国家或一国经济的不同发展阶段,公众心理对腐败的容忍程度有所不同.在经济增长迟缓的发展中国家,公众大多认为腐败可以容忍;在转型国家,公众对腐败的态度由容忍逐步转变为不容忍;在发达国家和地区,绝大多数公众都一致谴责腐败行为,并希望在原则的基础上对之予以惩罚.     

Corruption as a Self‐Fulfilling Prophecy: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Costa Rica

An influential literature argues that corruption behaves as a self‐fulfilling prophecy. Its central claim is that the individual returns to corruption are a function of the perceived corruptibility of the other members of society. Empirically, this implies that if one were to exogenously increase beliefs about societal levels of corruption, willingness to engage in corruption should also increase. We evaluate this implication by utilizing an information experiment embedded in a large‐scale household survey recently conducted in the Gran Área Metropolitana of Costa Rica. Changes in beliefs about corruption were induced via the random assignment of an informational display depicting the increasing percentage of Costa Ricans who have personally witnessed an act of corruption. Consistent with the self‐fulfilling prophecy hypothesis, we find that internalizing the information from the display on average increased the probability that a respondent would be willing to bribe a police officer by approximately .05 to .10.     

Democracy and Deceit: Regulating Appearances of Corruption

While corruption has long been recognized as an appropriate object of regulation, concern with appearances of corruption is of recent origin, coinciding with declining trust in government in the mid- to late-1960s. The reasoning that would support regulations of appearances, however, remains flawed, as it depends upon a "public trust" model of public service that is incomplete and often misplaced when applied to political representatives. The justification for regulating appearances is unambiguous, however, from the perspective of democratic theory. Democratic institutions of representation depend upon the integrity of appearances, not simply because they are an indication of whether political representatives are upholding their public trust, but because they provide the means through which citizens can judge whether, in particular instances, their trust is warranted. Representatives, institutions, and ethics that fail to support public confidence in appearances disempower citizens by denying them the means for inclusion in public judgments. These failures amount to a corruption of democratic processes.     

Corporate Governance and Corruption: A Cross-Country Analysis

Because the empirical literature on the causes of corruption has focused primarily on the demand side of corruption, that is, the corrupt officials who receive bribe payments, the role of the private sector as the supply side of corruption has not been examined thoroughly in this literature. In this article, it is argued that corporate governance is among the important factors determining the level of corruption. Using a cross-country data set, hypotheses that explicitly link various measures of corporate governance to the level of corruption are tested. The results show that corporate governance standards can have profound impacts on the effectiveness of the global anticorruption campaign.