![]() ![]() These factors explain up to 90% of the cross-national variation. It is higher in countries that depend on fuel exports or have intrusive business regulations and unpredictable inflation. Perceived corruption, as measured by such indexes, is lower in economically developed, long-established liberal democracies, with a free and widely read press, a high share of women in government, and a history of openness to trade. The more subjective indexes of perceived corruption-based on evaluations of experts and opinions of business people and citizens-turn out to be highly correlated with a variety of factors that are commonly believed to cause corruption. Įxamination of these data reveals a puzzling dichotomy. I encourage interested readers to take their own look at the data, which are posted on my website at. Of course, there are various paths one could follow through this body of work, and different scholars might draw different conclusions on key points. The goal is to provide a guide to readers of this literature who do not have the relevant data on their hard drive, and to sum up what is known and what is not at the end of this first phase of data exploration. Where possible, I use the data themselves to resolve open issues. Instead, I focus on a few key questions-about the reliability of the data, methods of analysis, and the robustness of certain results. There is already too much to cover comprehensively within the space limits Lambsdorff (2005) provides a useful review. In this article, I survey the first decade or so of such work. Soon others were using such data to investigate why some countries’ governments were perceived to be more corrupt than others. Second, at around the same time, an economist reported evidence of a long-suspected link between higher corruption and slower economic growth, based on a similar cross-national rating of corruption compiled by a business consultancy ( Mauro 1995). ![]() First, the Berlin-based organization Transparency International, which campaigns for honest government, began constructing a summary index of countries’ “perceived corruption” in the hope of embarrassing their leaders into reform. Scholars-like novelists, business people, and other global travelers-have long taken it as given that such exchanges occur more frequently in some countries, such as Indonesia or Nigeria, than in others, such as Canada or Iceland.Ībout a decade ago, attempts to measure and explain such differences received a dramatic boost from two events. The quintessential corrupt transaction envisioned is the gift of a bribe by a private citizen to a public official in return for some service that the official should either provide for free (e.g., registering a firm) or not provide at all (e.g., inside information). Corruption is usually understood to mean the “misuse of public office for private gain,” where the “private gain” may accrue either to the individual official or to groups or parties to which he belongs (e.g., Bardhan 1997). In recent years, a growing community of political scientists and economists has sought to understand why in some countries governments and the bureaucrats they control are more corrupt than in others. The subjective data may reflect opinion rather than experience, and future research could usefully focus on experience-based indicators. Reported corruption experiences correlate with lower development, and possibly with dependence on fuel exports, lower trade openness, and more intrusive regulations. However, controlling for income, most factors that predict perceived corruption do not correlate with recently available measures of actual corruption experiences (based on surveys of business people and citizens that ask whether they have been expected to pay bribes recently). Although the causal direction is usually unclear, instrumenting with income as of 1700 suggests higher development does cause lower perceived corruption. ![]() Countries that depend on fuel exports or have intrusive business regulations and unpredictable inflation are judged more corrupt. Quite strong evidence suggests that highly developed, long-established liberal democracies, with a free and widely read press, a high share of women in government, and a history of openness to trade, are perceived as less corrupt. ▪ Abstract I review recent efforts by political scientists and economists to explain cross-national variation in corruption using subjective ratings, and examine the robustness of reported findings. ![]()
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