Corruption, Fiscal Policy, and Growth: a Unified Approach

We study the effects of bureaucratic corruption on fiscal policy and economic growth, where corruption (i) reduces the tax revenue raised from households, (ii) inflates the volume of government spending, and (iii) reduces the productivity of ‘effective’ government expenditure. We distinguish between the policies pursued by (a) a nonoptimising, and (b) an optimising government. For both cases, corruption leads to higher income tax and inflation rates and a lower level of government spending, thus hindering growth. In the circumstances, an activist government could allocate its resources in
attempting to reduce the type of corruption that harms growth the most. Finally, the findings from our unified framework could rationalise the sometimes conflicting empirical evidence on the impact of corruption on growth in the literature.