Bureaucratic Corruption and Mass Media

Suphachol Suphachalasai

Public Economics from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This paper investigates the relationship between a bureaucracy and mass media industry, and its implications to corruption. We develop a bureaucratic model of corruption with mass media. A representative profit maximizing media firm seeks for corruption news to be printed and sold. Channels through which competition in media industry and press freedom affect equilibrium corruption in a bureaucracy are modeled. Different degrees of media freedom and competition affect production and employment decisions of media firms, and this in turn affects the effectiveness of media in monitoring corruption. Competition and freedom in media sector also have an influence on bureaucratic structure and consequently on equilibrium corruption. We find that the degree of competition in media market plays a significant role in controlling corruption. Freedom of media also reduces corruption. Empirical results support these findings. Media competition appears to be a more important tool to combat corruption than press freedom. The corruption problem in Italy could be reduced to the level experienced by France if the competitiveness of its media industry was to be improved to the same level as that of United Kingdom.

Keywords: Corrupton; Bureaucracy; Mass Media (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D73 D8 H11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2005-02-24
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-reg
Note: Type of Document - pdf; pages: 32. Environmental Economy and Policy Research, Discussion Paper Series 05.2005, Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de/econ-wp/pe/papers/0502/0502014.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: BUREAUCRATIC CORRUPTION AND MASS MEDIA (2005)
Working Paper: Bureaucratic Corruption and Mass Media (2005)
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:wpa:wuwppe:0502014

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Public Economics from University Library of Munich, Germany
Bibliographic data for series maintained by EconWPA ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).