Police and military checkpoints are a familiar sight on many roadways in poor countries. Although some of the officers are legitimately keeping the peace, others are out to line their pockets with baksheesh. Despite their apparent banditry, though, these extortionists respond to market forces in much the same way as do lawful businesspeople, finds a new study from Indonesia. \u201cMy research question was, Are corrupt officials just like any other economic actor?\u201d says Benjamin A. Olken, an associate professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the study\u2019s lead author. \u201cIf they are, then we have a wealth of economic tools to help us analyze how bribes are going to behave. And we also have to think about the market structure of bribe-takers before designing reforms.\u201d Olken found that the corrupted officials on Aceh and North Sumatra\u2019s highways indeed act like uncoordinated business monopolies–a situation that is bad for consumers because it raises the price of each bribe. It would be better to consolidate bribe-takers under the umbrella of a single monopolist who sets prices and coordinates activities. For instance, the \u201cone-stop shop\u201d reforms of many governments\u2014which allow citizens to get, say, six permits from one office, rather\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Police and military checkpoints are a familiar sight on many roadways in poor countries. Although some of the officers are legitimately keeping the peace, others are out to line their pockets with baksheesh. Despite their apparent banditry, though, these extortionists respond to market forces in much the same way as do lawful businesspeople, finds a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":544,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-90494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/544"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90494"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90494\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}