Gary Becker has died. In his honor, I plan to make a follow up post to the following comment I posted to the Becker-Posner blog.
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In my view, corruption is primarily a governance issue and there is only so much economists are able to add to the picture.
As one example, Sendhil Mullainathan has attempted to establish empirically whether corruption is something that has negative social externalities at all - Sam Huntington's point that bribery is "speed money" (which Mullainathan has suggested as a hypothesis) and so actually makes things better since things get done versus the counter-hypothesis that bribery simply makes things worse since it adds friction.
So many countries have been seen to regress badly in the presence of corruption, but if you look at countries known to have high degrees of corruption (ranging from Mexico to India), there is only so much economists can bring to bear - in terms of analysis - on this issue. It is primarily a governance problem.
And this brings me to a point I have made several times in the past. Underdeveloped countries are not just under-developed. They are under-managed.
