Varieties of Corruption: The Organization of Rent-Sharing in India

DateFebruary 21, 2014

Time6:00am to 7:30am

Location
4357 Bunche Hall

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Studies of corruption shed little light on ways in which corrupt rents are distributed across actors—insights that would prove enlightening for efforts to reduce corruption. I posit that the type of state resource over which actors are attempting to gain control—e.g. permits and licenses versus access to benefits from welfare schemes—shapes the character of control over resource allocation and so is a key predictor of patterns in rent-sharing. I present a framework for categorizing corrupt acts that emphasizes variation in the type of government resource and highlights disparities in the character of illicit payments across multiple realms of government activity. I then draw on new and original data from surveys of Indian politicians and bureaucrats and a new measure of rent dispersion, the effective distribution of rents (EDR), to show that there is considerable sharing of rents across government and non-government actors and that the perceived distribution of rents is strongly associated with the type of government resource. My evidence also shows that rent-sharing occurs to similar degrees for different types of corruption, but that the actors who benefit from corruption depends sharply on the type of government resource.

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