Explaining Patterns of Corruption in the Russian Regions

Corruption is one of the key problems facing the Russian state as it seeks to evolve out of its socialist past. Naturally, regional patterns of corruption exist across a country as large and diverse as the Russian Federation. To explain these variations, the authors analyze 2002 data from Transparency International and the Information for Democracy Foundation that provide the first effort to measure differences in the incidence of corruption across forty Russian regions. They find that corruption in Russia is fueled by the size of government and by the level of development. Within each region, the amount of corruption increases as the number of bureaucrats grows and gross regional product per capita decreases. Russian policymakers can therefore work to reduce corruption by effectively reforming or scaling back bureaucracies and by encouraging economic development outside of the key centers of Moscow and St. Petersburg.