More recently, however, new light has been cast on the cost imposed by what the report terms 'bureaucratic infrastructure' handling the movement of goods across borders.
The authors documented the role played by corruption in transport bureaucracies in driving trade costs, observing in great detail the ways in which port corruption emerges in Durban and Maputo in Southern Africa. Research was based on a unique dataset of directly observed bribe payments to customs officials and port operators for a random sample of 1,300 shipments.
According to Ports.co.za, the Port Technology report finds that the organisational features of each bureaucracy determined that customs agents had more opportunities to extract bribes in Maputo, whereas port operators had more opportunities to extract bribes in Durban. While corruption levels were high in both ports, bribes were higher and more frequent in Maputo relative to Durban.
Read the full article on .
Read the
full report (PDF) on www.porttechnology.org.
