The War on Corruption: The Role of Electronic Government

摘要

This paper explores the relationship between electronic government and corruption. Our main hypothesis is that digital government can increase the availability of information on public sector, making it more difficult to engage in corrupt activities without being caught. Our estimations are performed under several alternative methodologies: ordinary least squares, first differences, fixed effects and random effects. Based on a dataset that covers more than 150 counties, we find that a higher E-Government Development Index is associated with better corruption outcomes. Our results are robust to all the methodologies that we have implemented. The quality of telecommunication infrastructures and human capital can amplify the impact of digital government in corruption. We investigate how this relationship varies across income levels. Upper middle income countries are the ones that can extract more benefits from developing digital government. Low income countries should invest in infrastructures and education in order to benefit from electronic government.