Country: Brazil

Brazil

Brazil has been progressing steadily over the past ten years on transparency, e-government, elimination of the impunity culture and e-participation. It still has much to improve on administrative burden, regulatory quality and press freedom. Its neighbor Uruguay offers the best model for continuing what is already a positive evolution. However, quality of governance varies wildly across different geographical regions, posing a challenge for Brazil’s federalism on how to prevent the poorest regions with the highest inequality from falling behind and dragging down the rest. Controlling authoritarian tendencies is also a challenge.

How Does Political Finance Regulation Influence Control of Corruption? Improving Governance in Latin America

In this paper, we address the question of how political finance regulation affects control of corruption in Latin America from a quantitative perspective. We present a Political Finance Regulation Index with panel data from 180 countries over 20 years (1996-2015). This index was developed using the IDEA Political Finance Database, and once created, was applied to assess the relationship between political finance regulation and control of corruption.

In order to do this, we use the equilibrium model of control of corruption developed by Mungiu-Pippidi (2015). We also included judicial independence and public investment, considered as a constraint and an opportunity to corrupt, respectively. Lastly, we use control variables for level of development.

Results show that, in Latin America, increases in political finance regulation are related with a deterioration of control of corruption. This relationship is statistically significant in the panel estimations. Inversely, the negative relationship between regulation and control of corruption becomes positive in countries with high levels of judicial independence. In a similar way, increases in opportunities to corrupt, represented by levels of public investment, have a significant and negative effect in control of corruption.

Measuring Political Corruption from Audit Results: A New Panel of Brazilian Municipalities

Comparative research on corruption has always faced challenges on how to reliably measure this phenomenon. Indicators based on perceptions of or experience with corruption are the most common approaches, but these methods have also faced criticism regarding limitations to their conceptual and measurement validity. A number of scholars have thus sought to develop alternative, more objective, measures of corruption. Following this line of research, this paper relies on audit reports from Brazilian municipalities to construct a concrete indicator of political corruption. Data collection exploits the setup of randomized multiple audit rounds to construct a unique panel of 140 municipalities covering five administrative terms between 1997 and 2013. A first empirical application of data is presented, testing the potential deterrent effect of electoral accountability on future corruption levels.

Changing the Rule of the Game: a Diagnosis of Corruption in Brazil

In Brazil, corruption has always been part of political discussions, but changes in government hardly ever brought changes in the political and social structures. The great economic development of recent years might end up covering some of the problems. Therefore, it is fundamental to investigate whether in Brazil corruption is the norm or the exception, as well as to understand the main corruption mechanisms in order to design proper policies to tackle its most harmful forms so that the country can finally evolve towards good governance and impartial government.

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