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Recent empirical studies find that the direct effect of corruption on growth is statistically insignificant. However, there exists a discrepancy between these results and the intuition that corruption reduces over-all productivity, because total factor productivity also depends on the quality of institutions and their efficiency. The current paper addresses this issue and offers a new perspective on growth effects of corruption and shows that direct and indirect growth effects of corruption can be statistically significant. Moreover, the empirical results confirm the existence of both negative and positive growth effect of corruption.

Corrupt bureaucrats manipulate rules and regulations to coerce the private agents to pay bribes. In such an environment the cost of dealing with the public sector is uncertain as the regulations are not observed as they are originally defined. Combined with weak enforcement and compliance, predation of corrupt bureaucrats makes private disposable income volatile. We study this uncertainty within a stochastic dynamic growth model framework, where we generalize the corruption caused uncertainty as a shock to disposable income of agents. Consequently, corruption creates two adverse effects in the economy: higher risks associated with private investments and lower returns on private capital due to increased public burden. Both effects tend to lower the demand for investments, thus long run growth is compromised in the economy with the corrupt public sector.

It is known that government has discretionary power in providing public goods and regulating the economy. Corrupt bureaucracy with discretionary power creates and extracts rents by manipulating with the public good supply and regulations: i) by attaching excessive red tape to the public good they are providing; ii) or by making the regulations di±cult for the private agents to comply with. The former type of corruption results in less public input being provided at higher cost to the private agents. The latter increases non-compliance, which then breeds bribery. Consequently, the overall public sector burden is higher in the environment with corrupt bureaucracy. We show this outcome using a simple theoretical model, and then confront it with empirical evidence.