Proposal for a New Measure of Corruption, Illustrated With Italian Data

Standard cross-national measures of corruption are assembled through surveys. We propose a novel alternative objective measure that consists of the difference between a measure of the physical quantities of public infrastructure and the cumulative price government pays for public capital stocks. Where the difference is larger between the monies spent and the existing physical infrastructure, more money is being siphoned off to mismanagement, fraud, bribes, kickbacks, and embezzlement; that is, corruption is greater. We create this measure for Italy's 95 provinces and 20 regions as of the mid-1990s, controlling at the regional level for possible differences in the costs of public construction.