Helis Cristina Zanuto Andrade Santos

Corruption has reached alarming levels in recent years, over US$ 1 trillion has been paid in bribes worldwide. Thus many studies have directed their analysis to this problem in order to understand the determinants and impacts of corruption on the growth and development of countries. Some authors suggest, for instance, that the sophisticated technologies in countries that do not need such standard are possible potentializing sources of corruption. The theoretical and empirical literature presents a diversity of studies that seek to explain the social and economic development of the countries. However there is a gap regarding the concomitant effects of the productive structure and corruption on the improvement of the standard of living of nations. Thus the proposed objective is to investigate how the production structure and corruption impact on the socio-economic development of developing countries from 2002 to 2014. The Generalized Moments Method (GMM) with dynamic panel data is utilized in order to estimate and test an empirical model. Among the main results, it is noticed that corruption has a non-linear behavior in relation to development, which indicates that the impacts of corruption can occur in different proportions on development, even presenting positive and negative impacts, depending on the level of corruption. This suggests the need for specific anticorruption policies that are carefully designed according to the characteristics of each country. It is also necessary that the study about the aspects that involve the development contemplate both economic and social aspects, since there were signs of the need for complementarity between these indicators. In addition, in general there are signs that a more sophisticated productive structure works by distorting the effects of corruption control on socioeconomic development, for it intensifies the influence that corruption has on such development.