Chapter 25: Criminal Organisations and Corruption in Italy

Corruption is a commonplace phenomenon inherently coupled with the traits of the collective endeavours, and constantly diffused in the human society regardless of political regime, typologies of institutions, presence of public or private corporations.

Starting from the 80’s, a great amount of research has been done on the causes, consequences and the impact of corruption from the economics discipline perspective. Such studies have mainly inferred hypothesis and conclusions drawing on desk analysis that have been relying on aggregate macro-economic data. Of course corruption is very much difficult to be studied more in depth, because of the lack of first-hand empirical observations.