@MISC{Hite06measuringregional, author = {Nancy Hite}, title = {Measuring Regional Variation of Corruption Induced Inefficiency in Public Roads Construction, using German Data}, year = {2006} }
Share
OpenURL
Abstract
The goal of this project is to measure inefficiency in government spending on infrastructure, and thereby provide insight on regional variation in political corruption across Germany. The index is calculated as the ratio of physical quantities of public roads over the normalized, cumulative capital stock spent on roads. A greater prevalence of political corruption is believed to exist in regions where the ratio of the physical infrastructure to spending is low. This paper emulates the indexing procedure used by (Golden and Picci 2005), who measure overall infrastructure over aggregate public spending to proxy political corruption in Italy. However, this paper focuses specifically on roads and controls spending data more extensively. Although the empirics are straightforward, data collection is by far the most difficult aspect of this paper. Fortunately, at this time the majority of the data have been collected and formatted and what remains to be collected is still feasible. The index is still calculated for demonstrative purposes. Following the preliminary results, is a proposal for how this index may be employed in future research. I.