engleski

Regional Development and Corruption in Croatia

1. SCOPE OF RESEARCH The phenomenon of corruption is one of the basic hurdles on the path towards faster economic growth, particularly in transition economies. The level of corruption is dependant on numerous factors. Some are common to all countries, such as the effectiveness of the judiciary, the complexity of the taxation system, transparency, while the other group of factors is related to country specific socioeconomic factors which are, in their majority, inherited. Theories that corruption is a deterrent to development and the fact that corruption is widespread and growing in Croatia have brought focus to the anticorruption attempts of raising awareness of the destructive nature of corruption. The objective of this paper is to examine the relation between awareness of negative effects of corruption, on one side, and regional development, socio-economic and demographic indicators in Croatia, on the other side. Our hypothesis is that higher level of anticorruption awareness is associated with the higher level of regional development by counties in Croatia and their demographic structure. This paper is a seminal work using econometric modelling of the variables influencing the level of anticorruption awareness in individual counties in Croatia. 2. ANTICORRUPTION AWARENESS IN CROATIA AND EMPIRICAL MODELLING RESULTS The results of an opinion poll conducted in 2002 show that citizens in Croatia consider corruption as a local community problem. In 14 out of 21 counties in Croatia, more than 75 percent of respondents attributed high and very high importance of seizing corruption to increase the quality of public service. We have used the empirical modelling to investigate which factors influence the levels of anticorruption awareness in individual counties. The variable used to describe this level of anticorruption awareness in individual counties is labelled ANTICORRUPTION and it is the dependent variable in our model. All of the independent variables as well as the dependent variable (ANTICORRUPTION) have been expressed as index numbers in relation to the Croatian average, set as index 100. The regression function takes the following form: ANTICORRUPTION=f (REGINCOME, PUBEMP, HIGHEDUC, CHILDREN) The independent variables are the following: • REGINCOME – per capita disposable income in individual counties. • PUBEMP – the ratio of the total number of public sector employees in the total number of employed persons in a given county. • HIGHEDUC – an education level indicator, representing the ratio of population with higher education in the population of a given county, older than 15. • CHILDREN – a demographic variable, representing the ratio of youth under 15 years of age in the total population of a given county is a proxy of the age structure of the county. The econometric analysis has shown that the level of anticorruption awareness among the population is dependant on the particular county development level, measured by per capita disposable income, or rather per capita gross domestic product. There is a positive correlation in a way that a higher development level of a county implies in a higher level of anticorruption awareness. Particular counties demographic structure has shown itself as an important variable, as demographically younger counties are more aware of the negative effects of corruption. It seems that the younger labour force is exposed to a higher level to corruption in their everyday lives, and therefore there is a noticeable awareness of the detrimental nature of corruption. The education level variable, measured by the ratio of population with higher education, has not been found significant. The same applies to the variable representing the size of the public sector. It would seem that the quality of the public services is more important than simply the size of public sector. The suggested future research is to include institutional factors, such as decentralization in exploring corruption in Croatia

Regional development; Corruption; Anti-corruption awareness; Croatia

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