Curbing Corruption in Public Administration : A Case Study from Italy

The aim of this paper is to verify whether the historic sentence, no. 500/1999 of the Italian Legitimacy Court (Corte di Cassazione) in Plenary Session, may have contributed to diminishing bribery in Italy, by increasing the area of liability for both civil servants and the public administration. The empirical analysis is based on a case study conducted in Sicily, in the province of Catania, using a unique data set. The main results of the paper are: paying bureaucrats by means of an incentive wage regimes may not be effective in reducing corruption; an extension of the liability rule for the public administration and civil servants may discourage the phenomenon of bribery; finally, the perfect specification of property rights helps to reduce corruption