PUBLIC FINANCE QUARTERLY, cilt.52, sa.6, ss.910-927, 2024 (ESCI)
Corruption has been one of the challenging topics in public economics for years, prompting extensive discussions from various perspectives. In this study, we investigate the causal relationship between government size and corruption in Turkey, where the anticorruption performance has been getting worse over time until recently. By utilizing a long-span news-based corruption index spanning approximately three-quarters of a century, we conclude that government size serves as the long-term driving force behind corruption in Turkey from 1950 to 2019. This conclusion is robustly reached through a battery of dynamic time series analyses.