The Relationship between Administrative Corruption and Wages in Egypt's Governmental Sector: An Experimental Analysis

Abstract

This study investigates the hypothesis that raising wage could reduce administrative corruption. We use experimental methodology applied to 120 participants to test two hypotheses. The first hypothesis is that the higher the wage, the lower the rate of acceptance of bribes (a proxy for corruption), either at zero or positive conviction rates. The second hypothesis is the higher the conviction rate, the lower the rate of acceptance of bribes for both the low-wage and high-wage groups. The main finding of this study is that all obvious differences between wage groups (whether with positive or zero conviction rates) in the acceptance rates of bribes are not significant. This suggests the two hypotheses are not supported.

Keywords: Administrative, Corruption-Experimental, Economics-Strategy, Method-Wages-Institutional Controls

JEL Classification: C9, D02, J31