Winner of the 2019 ResearchEdge Competition

Laura will be presenting, along with Carolina Isaza, Daniela Franco, Patricia Garcia-Marquez and Laura Uribe, their work: "Corruption Trap: the Case of Colombian Regions"

Since the 1990s, corruption has been increasingly studied from various disciplines and diverse theoretical approaches and perspectives all around the world. Nevertheless, until now, few are the studies that take regional or local views into consideration for understanding the behavior of this phenomenon within countries. This paper addresses corruption in the regions of Colombia in relation to their levels of development.
Literature points out that there are different ways in which corruption and development are related. Authors like Daniel Kaufmann (2002) establish a correlation between socioeconomic development, growth, inequality, poverty and corruption. Likewise, Gupta, Davoodi and Alonso -Term (1998) conclude that corruption increases income inequality and poverty by distorting the level and effectiveness of social spending. However, in these vicious cycles the causes and consequences are not yet clear. Considering the above, this paper analyses the relationship between corruption and development in Colombia from a subnational perspective.
We claim that there is a corruption trap that makes it difficult to establish the dependent and independent variables between corruption and development. The question that guides our paper is: What are the dynamics between corruption and development at the state level in Colombia?
To answer it, we collected 22 indicators for the 32 states that make up the administrative division of Colombia. These data covered the period 2014 -2017 in order to consider the last presidential term and the transition between two local administrations, as well as to address missing data problems.
These indicators were grouped into three dimensions: development, institutional capacity and transparency. To identify the relations between these categories we used a development proxy and we built an institutional capacity index and a corruption/transparency index.
From this, a scatter plot chart was built to categorize the different states of Colombia by their levels of corruption, institutional capacity and development. Also, the data obtained by the diagram was georeferenced to identify specific characteristics of each region. The conclusions include a categorization of the states of Colombia according to the existing links between corruption and development on each one of them with institutional capacity as an intervening variable.