The Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16: Addressing corruption in Italian local governments

The fight against corruption is one of the main challenges facing governments internationally, also included in the objective no. 16 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Corruption is a complex term to define. In the paper we adopt a definition of corruption as “the exchange between an act of power and a performance, not necessarily a monetary one”. Corruption is a constantly evolving phenomenon and, generally, a hidden one. The phenomenon is present in all developed and developing countries of the world, as evidenced by the world ranking of nations of the perceived corruption index (CPI), even if the intensity and degree of diffusion of the phenomenon varies significantly among countries. There is a growing interest in corruption phenomenon as it is considered one of the main obstacles to economic, political, and social development, as well as an element capable of accentuating inequalities biasing the implementation of public policies. In recent decades, corruption has become part of the agendas of international institutions and of some non-governmental organizations as a very relevant issue on which to intervene at the level global. At the basis of the interest developed in this phenomenon there is a widespread awareness of negative effects of corruption in terms of economic growth and the need to fight it through multilateral strategies involving governments, businesses, international institutions and companies civil. Corruption in fact determines high collective social costs, guaranteeing benefits to a restricted one circle of people or institutions. Several factors are hypothesized to have an impact on corruption. These factors can be divided into exogenous and endogenous. Existing literature just focuses on the relationship between individual factors and corruption or on the development of specific indicators, shadowing the multidimensionality and the interdisciplinary nature of the phenomenon and, above all, the interactions between the various factors that affect corruption. The aim of the paper is thus to set up a quantitative model able to simultaneously consider the variables considered relevant in the explain corruption, found through a review of theoretical and empirical literature, endogenous and exogenous ones. The proposed methodology is a system of structural equations, that gives to the researchers the opportunity to take into account, in addition to the observed variables, also the unobserved (latent) variables.