A theory of symbiotic corruption

Xuezheng Chen, Lin Gui, Tao Wu and Jun Zhang

Journal of Comparative Economics, 2024, vol. 52, issue 2, 478-494

Abstract: Symbiotic corruption occurs when senior officials employ the symbiotic relationship with junior officials in corrupt activities, to induce them to participate in the political contest for power and political rents. This paper develops a formal theoretical model to analyze the mechanics and consequences of symbiotic corruption prevailing in weakly institutionalized societies. We find that in the presence of symbiotic corruption, political contests tend to arise when the initial distribution of political rents between rival factions is disproportional to their de facto political power. Anti-corruption by increasing the effective penalty or enhancing monitoring of corruption works differently, but both are surprisingly ineffective in a society plagued by symbiotic corruption. In an unbalanced political system, where the initial distribution of political rents is relatively disproportional, an increase in the effective penalty induces rival factions to reach a tacit collusion to maintain peace and leads to universal symbiotic corruption; a rise in monitoring efficiency decreases total corruption but inevitably increases symbiotic corruption. In a balanced political system, universal corruption always emerges, and anti-corruption only affects the transformation between symbiotic and individual corruptions. This study not only sheds light on the (in)effectiveness of conventional anticorruption measures in the presence of symbiotic corruption, but also provides a new perspective on the link between bureaucratic hierarchies, national-level power dynamics, and corruption.

Keywords: Symbiotic corruption; Systematic corruption; Political contest; Political rents; Anti-corruption law enforcement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D73 K42 P48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0147596723001142
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jcecon:v:52:y:2024:i:2:p:478-494

DOI: 10.1016/j.jce.2023.12.005

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Comparative Economics is currently edited by D. Berkowitz and G. Roland

More articles in Journal of Comparative Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().