Corruption in public finances, and the effects on inflation, taxation, and growth

Abstract

In this paper, we study the effects of bureaucratic corruption on inflation, taxation, and growth. Here corruption takes three forms: (i) it reduces the tax revenues that are raised from households, (ii) it inflates the volume of government spending, and (iii) it reduces the productivity of ‘effective’ government expenditure. Our policy experiments reveal that the effect of (i) is to increase both seigniorage and the income tax rate, and to decrease the steady-state growth rate. The effect of (ii) is to increase seigniorage, which leads to lower growth, although the effect on the income tax rate is ambiguous. The effect of (iii) is to increase seigniorage and decrease the income tax rate. The former yields a lower growth rate, while the latter has an ambiguous effect on growth. These findings, from our unified framework involving corruption in public finances, could rationalise the apparently conflicting evidence on the impact of corruption on economic growth provided in the literature, highlighting the presence of conditional corruption effects.