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Field
Abstract
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Before
The Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party passed on 23 October 2014 a "Decision concerning Several Major Issues in Comprehensively Advancing Governance According to Law" which stressed the current government's strong commitment to ght corruption. Among other measures, heavier penalties, including death penalty, are envisaged for those o ering bribes, and severe restrictions to the leniency o ffered to bribe-givers. In order to understand the Chinese officials' dissatisfaction with the current legislation, which was introduced in 1997, we collected data on the investigations of bribery and public official corruption, available for most Chinese provinces for the period 1986-2010. The available evidence so far points to a substantial reduction in the number of major corruption cases around the 1997 reform, raising questions on the motivations for the newly proposed policy change.
However the data on prosecutions are subject to several limitations, in particular they cannot help disentangle deterrence from detection, or criminal activity from prosecution e fforts, nor the details of the reform that produce the impact and through which channels. Moreover, some aspects of the legislative reform, such as the provision of leniency for the bribe-giver, were already in place since 1988. For this reason, we plan to collect and analyze more in depth a strati fied random sample of prosecution case fi les between 1980 and 2010. Given that the sample size will be determined by power and budget considerations, we cannot gain any insight from these new data about the incidence of bribery in general.
We can instead observe the impact of the legislative reform on specifi c details of the corrupt behavior, and the mechanisms through which this behavior occurs or is deterred.
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After
One-sided leniency policies and asymmetric punishment are regarded as potentially powerful anti-corruption tools, also in the light of their success in busting price-fixing cartels. It has been argued, however, that the introduction of these policies in China in 1997 has not helped fighting corruption. Consistent with this view, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party passed on 23 October 2014 a Decision concerning Several Major Issues in Comprehensively Advancing Governance According to Law which stressed the current government’s strong commitment to fight corruption introducing heavier penalties but also severe restrictions of leniency offered to bribe-givers. Claims on the effects of the 1997 reform are not backed by data, to our knowledge, while evaluating the effects of a policy on crimes like corruption is difficult. These crimes are typically only observed if detected and convicted by the police, and an increase in observed convictions may as well be due to an increase in the total number of crimes rather than to a positive effect of the policy. We collected data on the investigations of bribery and public official corruption, available for most Chinese provinces for the period 1986-2010. The available evidence so far points to a substantial and stable reduction in the number of major corruption cases around the 1997 reform, a result per se ambiguous but consistent with a positive deterrence effect of the 1997 reform. Here we describe the planned case study analysis under way to corroborate and help the interpretation of these preliminary findings.
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