The extent and cost of corruption in transport infrastructure. New evidence from Europe

Abstract

Transport infrastructure provision from roads to waterways involves large amounts of public funds in very complex projects. It is hardly a surprise that all across Europe, but especially in high corruption risk countries, it is a primary target of corrupt elites. This article provides a state-of-the-art review of the literature on the cost of corruption and estimates the level of corruption risks and associated costs in European infrastructure development and maintenance in 2009-2014 using novel data on over 40,000 government contracts. Two forms of corruption costs are investigated in the empirical section: 1) distorting spending structure and project design, and 2) inflating prices. Findings indicate that corruption steers infrastructure spending towards high value as opposed to small value investment projects. It also inflates prices by 30-35% on average with largest excesses in high corruption risk regions. Contrary to perceptions, corruption risks in infrastructure are decoupled to a considerable extent from the national corruption environment. Source data and risk scores are made downloadable at digiwhist.eu/resources/data.

Renegotiations and Corruption in Infrastructure: The Odebrecht Case

“…So far we have been able to determine the amount invested, both before and after renegotiations, as well as whether bribes were paid or not, for all Odebrecht projects in eight countries during the period considered in the agreement. 26 This includes all countries in Latin America mentioned in the plea bargain, with the exception of Venezuela (because of data limitations) and Brazil (which we plan to include in future versions). This amounts to 90 projects procured either as a public work (69 projects) or a public-private partnership (21 projects).…”

“…For example, with the broader de nition for bribe payments, the ratios for the latter are 11 when normalizing by initial investment (see Table 2) and 6.8 when normalizing by total investment (see Table 5), which are both much larger than the corresponding value of / , which is approximately 3 when the social return to projects is 20%. To see why this is the case, we note that using (26) for and , dividing the rst expression by the second one and assuming that returns to projects are, on average, the same for projects with and without bribes, leads to:…”

Multiple land use planning for living places and investments spaces

“…The practice of the rule of law itself, and the way it handles diverging ideologies around planning conflicts, is influenced by ideology which varies by legal context (Lees & Shepherd, 2018). Legitimacy in relation to following the rule of law relates to matters of corruption that often can be found around government contracts (Fazekas & Tóth, 2018), which may also be of relevance for contractual relations between planning authorities and market operators. The idea is that enhancing accountability can be a measure to address corruption, for example by endorsing a programme of '(1) a simplification of the rules, (2) public access to information and (3) a sense of the state and appropriate civic behaviour' (Grossi & Pianezzi, 2018, p. 90).…”

Motorway Route Planning with Regarding the Adverse Effects on Agricultural Production Space

“…The length of the tested route is 29.317 km (Variants I and III), while in the alternative version designed for the purposes of this study, it is 29.784 km (Variant II). Małopolskie Voivodeship, situated in the southern part of Poland, occupies an area of slightly more than 15,000 km 2 . In terms of the economic potential and investment attractiveness, Małopolskie Voivodeship is among the leading regions in Poland, inter alia due to the good transport accessibility and the location at the intersection of international transit routes, or the support for investors through, among other things, the establishment of special economic zones as well as good research and scientific facilities.…”

“…Since the duration of investment preparation and implementation has begun to play a significant role, sustainable development of the agricultural space is not always given a priority. A short designing time has necessitated the introduction of many simplifications in projects and decisions that affected the subsequent simplifications in analyses of effective investment planning [2].…”