The Conflict Against Corruption and the Pursuit of Efficiency in Public Negotiation in Italy

This work aims to investigate the relationship between the two diseases of public negotiation that is the inefficiency and corruption. For twenty years Italian Legislator trend, has been to fight corruption through the deprivation in the hands of public officials of the needed discretion to take efficient choices, through the tightening of purchasing procedures and contractual models. The path followed by the Legislator in fighting corruption can be criticized because it has a priori renounced to the efficiency, especially in the case of complex contracts, with the consequence of bad contract terms, overspending, poor quality, useless contracts, improper engineering, etc. By inverting the traditional approach, it is reasonable to argue that measures to combat and reduce the inefficiency can also have the indirect effect of reducing corruption. In fact, if corruption corresponds to a portion of the inefficiency and hides behind it, improving efficiency (i.e. the reduction of costs, the shortening of the times, quality improvement and ultimately the achievement of the performance) can reduce implementation space of corruptive pacts.