Abstract

GONZALEZ LARA, José María  and  SANCHEZ CARRERA, Edgar J.. Corruption for the rich and the poor in Mexico: Who supports it even more?. El trimestre econ [online]. 2019, vol.86, n.344, pp.1033-1055.  Epub June 23, 2020. ISSN 2448-718X.  https://doi.org/10.20430/ete.v86i344.799.

Who is the most affected by corruption, the rich citizen or the poor? Who is more likely to validate corrupt activities, the rich or the poor? A fundamental question that the members of a society face is whether they would like to live in a corrupt system. In other words, if people had an option between choosing a corrupt State over an honest State, which one they should go for? We claim that in a society characterized by inhabitants with varying levels of income, the answer to the question may differ between the rich and the poor. We show that with significant costs of corruption, the poorer section of the society tends to suffer more than the richer one concerning the honest system where public officials are honest. By applying the robust least squares technique, for Mexico over the 1996-2016 period, it is shown that: 1) in Mexico the rich support/like/want/contribute more to a corrupt system; 2) the poor are very affected by a corrupt system; 3) the government and its policies have no effect on the income of the rich, while for the poor, if the government’s policies are of better or higher quality, then the less poor they will be, and 4) economic inequality, measured by the Gini index, affects the poor more than the rich.

Keywords : Corrupt behavior; economic inequality; public servers; outliers in econometrics.

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