Fighting Corruption and Building the Path towards a Green Public Administration in the EU

Authors: Maria Gheorghe, Veronica Tenea

Abstract

The main purpose of our current research is to identify the direct link that the current state of central public administration might have on enhancing corruption in the EU countries. The obtained results are going to be considered and discussed in the context of the current trend towards sustainable development and the need of a green public administration in order to achieve the existing targets (such as carbon neutrality and the rest of the SDGs). Thus, the actions implemented across the EU related to green development tend to have a small intensity impact in the context of corruption, especially in developing countries. Thus, our current research focused on analyzing the data from 25 European countries between 2014 and 2025 in order to quantify the impact of employment and remuneration in the central public administration on the overall corruption perception. The methodology involved creating a linear regression model using the collected data from Eurostat. Our results indicated that 69.66% of the variation in the corruption perception index can be explained by the number of employees in the central public administration and their average remuneration. The strongest correlation was identified between the average remuneration of the employees in this area of public administration and the corruption index (0.829). The relationship between these two variables translates in an increase with 0.95 in the corruption index at an increase with 1 Euro in the average remuneration. On the other hand, the link between the number of employees from central public administration and corruption index is significantly weaker, with a correlation coefficient of only 0.05. The direct link and the economic interpretation indicates that an increase with one employee in the central public administration will trigger an increase with 0.00003 in the total value of the corruption index. The novelty of our research is determined by the specificity of the independent variables included in our regression analysis (oriented on the central public administration). The results have significant implication for both theory and practice, as they suggest that even in the context of the most recent policy development for sustainable growth, the EU region still needs additional support for fighting corruption, with an increased focus on the less developed countries.