effective and transparent law enforcement is in place (Van Rijckeghem and Weder, 1997). Authors such as Lacko (1996) argue that countries that have adopted common law systems (i.e., Great Britain and former colonies) with the ultimate goal to protect propriety owners against harmful interventions by the sovereign are much more effective in this sense in preventing corruption practices than civil law systems. The latter were adopted by most continental European countries and their former colonies. They were originally developed by monarchs to be used for state building with great focus on respect of hierarchy and the authority of offices (Lacko, 1996). Failure of the internal control and monitoring system to detect and punish the self-motivated agent at an early stage provides an additional incentive for the latter to select the second or third best candidate. This situation will undermine the performance of the employees and the overall productivity of the economy causing a large segment of the active population to be pushed outside the labor market. In contrast, the presence of internal political checks and balances contributes to maintain the pressure for more transparency and accountability of government officials. In democratic societies, the opposition plays the central role in detecting any fraudulent maneuvers by officials representing the government in place. In contrast, where opposition is completely marginalized as in totalitarian regimes across the Arab world for instance, with no authority to question the practices of government officials, bribes are used to gain those officials’ sympathy before they make their decisions to grant public goods (Van Rijckeghem and Weder, 1997). We use as a proxy of the domestic political pluralism and participation, the percentage of **(the opposition vote share)** in the parliament as compiled by the World Bank Database of Political Institutions (Keefer, 2009). A higher index indicates a more dynamic political environment in which opposition parties hold an important share of the legislative branch and thus have more impact on denouncing fraudulent practices of government officials and questioning the causes of the growing number of unemployed youth.

The level of wages paid to government officials, certain authors have argued, contributes to the process of sustaining corruption practices when providing public goods. Because the utility function of an official is, at its simplest form, composed of regular real income (wage) plus possible bribes received against certain services or privileges the latter provided, the attempt by the official to maximize this utility function in a situation where the public sector wage is established at a low level could only be achieved through the maximization of the bribe portion of the revenue (Van Rijckeghem and Weder, 1997). Tanzi (1998) argues that as a result of the modest government wages, the “temptation price” may be far less than the value of the potential benefit. While the theoretical assumption that high government wage levels may reduce the incentive for bribery is widely accepted among scholars and political leaders, certain authors have developed a counter-argument when distinguishing between corruption due to need that could be to a large extent reduced by the increase of the Page | 10