Paying the Dues? Access, Congestion, and Bribery

• In Event: Clientelism and Distributive Politics 1

Abstract

Bribery in public service delivery, regardless of its welfare consequences, is a fact of life for citizens across the world, with well-connected and richer citizens enjoying a privileged access to public services. In this paper, we argue that bribery can act as an economic mechanism to allocate regulated public goods that are otherwise scarce, in a market-like way. In many developing countries, certain public goods such as healthcare or bureaucratic services are in principle available to all citizens at the same price, but in practice supply is not enough to meet demand due to low public resources. By charging higher prices for scarce public goods, public officials deter citizens who are unwilling or unable to pay from partaking in those goods and are, therefore, able to meet this new lower demand with the available supply of goods. As an example of this, previous research has shown that bribery is more common in public services where delays and red tape are prevalent. In addition, there is evidence that predatory public officials often create opportunities for taking bribes by manufacturing scarcity. While this evidence does favor the argument advanced in this work, no direct empirical test of it exists. In this paper we propose to directly test the proposed argument by studying the role of bribery as an allocation mechanism for public goods in the context of the delivery of healthcare services in Guatemala. First, we show that more congested service facilities have a higher likelihood of bribery as a way of rationing out services based on willingness to pay. Second, we hypothesize that citizens who live further from service providers may be more likely to engage in bribery to access public services as a way of offsetting the accessibility advantage of those who live closer by, effectively trading for accessibility on the market for public goods. We combine administrative data with data from a large household survey conducted in Guatemala in 2019. Our results have a direct, simple and easily-implementable policy implication for the reduction of bribery in developing countries: improving access to public goods will likely also reduce the incidence of bribery, meaning that governments, NGOs and private citizens wanting to fight corruption can do so by focusing their effort on increasing accessibility to public services, thus maximizing the welfare effects of their efforts.

Authors

• Diego José Romero, Duke University

• Fatih Serkant Adiguzel, Duke University

• Marco Morucci, New York University