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This article traces the organization of corruption in public procurement, by theoretically and empirically assessing the contribution of extra‐legal governance organizations (EGO) to supporting it. Theoretically, we explore the governance role played by organized criminal groups in corruption networks, facilitating corrupt transactions by lowering search costs, bargaining costs, and enforcement cots. Empirically, the analysis exploits a rare empirical setup of proven cases of both EGO presence and absence in contract awards by Italian municipalities. We use traditional regression and supervised machine‐learning methods for identifying and validating proxy indicators for EGO presence in public procurement such as single bidding or municipal spending concentration. Internal validity of our models is very high, 85% of unseen contracts are correctly classified. External validity is moderate, our predicted EGO presence score correlates with established indicators of organized criminality across the whole of Italy and Europe with a linear correlation coefficient of about 0.4.

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This chapter analyzes the role played by corruption in post-disaster\ud contexts. Data show growth in both natural and man-made disasters and in\ud humanitarian response provided by bilateral and multilateral donors. These events\ud have become more frequent and also cause more deaths. Moreover, the data\ud demonstrate a strong relation between the impact of these disasters on the standards\ud of living and the prior level of corruption of the country. The severity of\ud disasters is a consequence of corruption, but the opportunities for corruption are\ud also increased in post-disaster situations. Several factors contribute to frustrating\ud the transparency and accountability of decision-making processes during humanitarian\ud crises. We include all these factors in a ‘‘formula of corruption’’. Despite\ud the growing importance of this issue, the international community has responded\ud to these crucial problems only tentatively. We review those international treaties\ud that have addressed the issue of corruption at the international level. These treaties\ud are preliminary instruments to fight corruption, even if they are not specifically\ud designed to fight this plague in post-disaster contexts. This lack of institutional\ud response has caused civil society and NGOs to take independent measures. For this\ud reason, several NGOs have recommended the implementation of further action in\ud order to map and prevent corruption