经济发展、制度结构与腐败程度————基于2006—2010年G省21个地级市面板数据的分析

在中国廉政建设实践中,经济发展、制度结构与腐败程度之间究竟存在何种关系,一直是学界争论的热点问题之一。基于G省21个地级市2006—2010年面板数据构建的固定效应模型显示,当把地区国内生产总值、政府规模和公务员相对工资三个变量引入分析模型后,目前阶段经济发展水平、政府规模和公务员相对工资与腐败程度之间均呈正相关关系,即经济发展水平的提升和制度结构因素的变化均未起到遏制腐败蔓延的作用。这就意味着,在一定发展时期内,单纯依靠提高经济发展水平、优化政府规模和改善公务员的薪酬结构不能有效地遏制腐败行为,反腐败必须依靠更系统的制度变革。

Economic Development,Institutional Structure,and the Degree of Corruption : A Panel Data Analysis Based on 21 Prefecture-level Cities in G Province (2006-2010)

It has been a widely discussed academic issue that what is the relationship between economic development,institutional structure,and the degree of corruption in the practice of anti-corruption campaign in China . However the existing literature largely focuses on cross-national data to analyze the causes of corruption and overlooks social,economic,and in particular,cultural factors in different countries .In the mean time current research on corruption in China remains on the level of macro-factor analysis due to data scarcity .There have been few empirical studies to test the research hypothesis based on large sample data .In general the″real world″inquiry of corruption in transitional China is largely lacking . This article first provides a comprehensive review on causal factors of corruption in China and abroad based on the state-centered and market-centered paradigms and elucidates how economic development and institutional structure factors may have a significant impact on curbing corruption .Following the theoretical review this article uses the panel data from 2006 2010 in 21 prefecture-level cities in G province to analyze the relationship between economic development,institutional structure factors and the degree of corruption .Based on fix-effect panel data model,local Gross Domestic Product (GDP),government size,and relative pay scale of civil servants are used as proxy of economic development and institutional structure factors .It is found that all the above-mentioned factors had a positive impact on corruption and neither was able to curb corruption at the local level .It is argued that in a certain time period economic development and institutional advancement could not provide strong anti-corruption mechanisms . The policy implication of this research indicates that the reliance on promoting economic development,optimizing government size,and improving civil servants' pay are not effective in anti-corruption campaigns .More systematic institutional reforms have to be put in place to curb corruption . There are several important contributions of this article .First of all,city-level data is used to measure the impact of economic development and institutional structure on corruption,in comparison to most existing literature that relied on cross-national or provincial level data . City-level data limits the scope of analysis and unifies the socio-economic characters of the unit of analysis,which significantly improves the validity and explanatory power of this research . Moreover,due to data limitation most existing research uses basic pay of civil servant as the proxy of institutional structure and ignores the existence of large amount of allowances as part of civil servants' income .This research collects internal pay data from local disciplinary inspection committees and uses actual pay statistics that include both fringe allowances and basic pays .This data provides a much better measurement and improves the validity and explanatory power of this research . Due to the limitation of data availability,ambiguity of corruption measures,and varying statistical standards in different cities this article could not include all necessary control variables in the model,which may present potential validity threat to the explanatory power of this research .This methodological issue is a limitation of similar studies and should be addressed in future research .