Copyright © 2011 Serena Brianzoni et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

We study the relationship between corruption in public procurement and economic growth within the Solow framework in discrete time, while assuming that the public good is an input in the productive process and that the State fixes a monitoring level on corruption. The resulting model is a bidimensional triangular dynamic system able to generate endogenous fluctuations for certain values of some relevant parameters. We study the model from the analytical point of view and find that multiple equilibria with nonconnected basins are likely to emerge. We also perform a stability analysis and prove the existence of a compact global attractor. Finally, we focus on local and global bifurcations causing the transition to more and more complex asymptotic dynamics. In particular, as our map is nondifferentiable in a subset of the states space, we show that border collision bifurcations occur. Several numerical simulations support the analysis. Our study aims at demonstrating that no long-run equilibria with zero corruption exist and, furthermore, that periodic or aperiodic fluctuations in economic growth are likely to emerge. As a consequence, the economic system may be unpredictable or structurally unstable.