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  • Essay / Using Experimental Economics to Solve the World's Corruption Problem

    Corruption in public and government agencies exists on a global scale, disrupting the global economy through money laundering , in various forms such as embezzlement, corruption and abuse of power. As reported by Bloomberg in May 2018, the recent Malaysian 1MDB scandal involved more than 10 countries to launder the misappropriation of Malaysian public funds. It is up to regulators and law enforcement to prevent this scenario from happening in the future by considering the characteristics and causal effects, as the main basis for developing better regulations and investigations. In this statement, I would like to examine whether experimental economics can be used as a reference to generalize the characteristics of this issue globally and help policy makers/regulators in this area. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an Original Essay To begin with, the advantages of experimental economics are that we can clearly see the characteristics of fraudulent activities based on a small sample size. This will allow us to understand how corruption mechanisms work in economic events, whether they take into account certain aspects such as rules, norms, political and social preferences or whether they focus only on their own interest. We can analyze the data and then evaluate how public officials carry out fraud. Subsequently, we can establish practical preventive actions and regulations to react and avoid these actions. In China, as mentioned by Yu (2008), corruption is usually carried out by government officials who abuse their powers and misappropriate funds for their own gains. In other words, corrupt officers use their powers to maximize their wealth by creating systematic businesses and organizing public tenders and contracts for their partners and relatives. In my opinion, it is accepted that the feasible steps that can be taken by policymakers here are to form better anti-corruption commissions and oversight, in order to mitigate this type of corruption. Additionally, with experimental economics, Fehr (2014) stated that several factors that are difficult to observe in the real world can be observed in the experiment. Therefore, this may reflect majority views in fraudulent activities, whether previously identified or never identified. However, this method also has questionable drawbacks, in which we cannot simply apply this experimental result to the global bureaucracy. Indeed, human behavior is affected by various perceptions that we cannot generalize from a simple sample. As Levit and List (2007) state, the choices individuals make are highly dependent not only on financial implications, but also on the circumstances, multiple variables, and context in which a decision is embedded, as well as how the experimental samples are selected. . In developing countries in particular, laws and regulations are not well established, providing more opportunities for corruption and fraud. Knutsen et al (2016) stated that in Africa, the mining industry there is frequently corrupted by giving/receiving bribes. Morland (2018) tells us that doing business in India generally involves corrupt activities. In these cases, we.