românăCorruption in Latin America
Lava Jato is Latin America’s largest corruption scandal to date. Brazilian prosecutors discovered that construction companies were colluding with employees of the state-owned oil company, Petrobras to win public works contracts (Fuentes, 2016). Those involved in the scheme stole billions of state dollars (Leahy, 2016; Sandy, 2016). Prosecutors further revealed that bribes paid by Odebrecht, the region’s largest construction group, extended to 11 other countries besides Brazil (DOJ, 2016). In Peru, 29 million dollars were paid to secure public works contracts worth nearly five times that amount (Hochstetler, 2017).
Lava Jato is a recent and striking reminder of the corruption that burdens Latin America. To make matters worse, the high levels of corruption contribute to some of the region’s other problems—from lack of political legitimacy (Seligson, 2002) to slow economic growth (Kaufmann and Wei, 1999). In sector after sector, corruption generates inefficiencies (Kaufmann, 1997). It incentivises delays in public procedures (Mauro, 1995), and requires resources to be spent on hiding evidence of quid-pro-quo transactions (Rose-Ackerman, 1978).
Paul Felipe Lagunes, professor and researcher from Columbia University, will share with us some amazing results from a two-year field experiment on the effects of social audit in Peru over the delivery of public works.
The study
I executed a field experiment in Peru to test the extent to which civil society oversight can curb corruption in public infrastructure when its efforts are supported by the relevant authority. The study’s main result shows that districts that received anti-corruption monitoring spent 51.39% less in the execution of public works than comparable districts that were less scrutinised. In other words, corruption fighting in this instance saved the Peruvian treasury a few million US dollars. This finding challenges the assumption that anti-corruption oversight is an obstructive activity that makes a public administration work less efficiently, explains Paul Felipe Lagunes, professor and researcher from Columbia University
He will show us how Transparency International Peru´s social audit work has saved the state more than USD 24 million on public works, Thursday, 8 February 2018, 14.30 CET.
More information on the study is available here: https://www.theigc.org/blog/guardians-accountability-field-experiment-corruption-inefficiency-perus-local-public-works/
