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Quality & Quantity
Published in: Quality & Quantity 4/2018

20-07-2017

Women and corruption: evidence from multinational panel data

Authors: Yu Hao, Chun-Ping Chang, Zao Sun

Published in: Quality & Quantity | Issue 4/2018

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Abstract

In this paper we investigate whether the ratio of female population is related with lower corruption, utilizing a multinational panel data with 80 countries for the period 2000–2012 and employing the Generalized Method of Moments as well as the ordered probit regression methods. This is the first study on the impacts of different female groups on corruption. Overall speaking, the estimation results are pluralistic. Higher female ratios in the legislative branch and in the labor force are significantly associated with a lower level of corruption, while the female ratio in secondary enrollment is positively related with corruption; however, the female ratio of the whole population has insignificant impacts on corruption. The policy implications are that a simple enhanced female ratio and educational level are not the effective way to inhibit corruption in our sample countries, whereas improvements of the female ratio in the legislative branch and the labor force contribute to controlling corruption. These results are basically robust for the two estimation methods and for the two subsamples of developed and developing countries. As a result, the estimation results on the relationship between corruption and gender might vary remarkably when different indicators for the female groups are utilized, which should some light on future studies.
next article Erratum to: Women and corruption: evidence from multinational panel data

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Footnotes
1
It should be noted, however, in Goetz (2007) and Alhassan-Alolo (2007), that the arguments proven are only words and some primary analyses with raw data; no rigorous empirical studies such as econometric estimations were conducted to verify their opinions.
 
2
In practice, the experiments are usually conducted by students. As Fehr et al. (2003) stressed, because students usually have better education, a higher IQ, and a more narrow age range than average citizens, and because the students usually come from families whose incomes are higher than the average level, they might not be good representatives of citizens of the whole society.
 
3
Dong et al. (2012) utilized both micro-and macro-level datasets in the empirical study section with different purposes. Two different micro-level datasets were used as robustness checks for each other to investigate the determinants of corruption, while the macro-level data are utilized to examine the potential dynamics of conditional corruption.
 
4
There are several articles that discuss corruption issues from different perspectives. Naidu and Chand (2014) empirically discovered the linkages between corruption and business governance in the Oceania region; the authors showed that all business governance indicators are positively correlated with the corruption index. Ismail and Rashid (2014) carried out the cointegration and causal relationships between corruption, political instability, and judicial inefficiency in Pakistan from 1984 to 2011; the authors revealed a weak causal relationship among variables. Furthermore, Chabova (2017) provided comprehensive overviews of composite indices that measure corruption perception in the European region; the results are used to compare with the other measurements of corruption from the World Bank, Transparency International, European Social Survey, World Values Survey, etc.
 
5
In some estimations, average income or per capita GDP is utilized as an explanatory variable and corruption is introduced as the dependent variable (e.g., Dollar et al. 2001; Dong and Torgler 2013). Because corruption itself might be an important factor that affects income, which has been verified by previous studies including Méndez and Sepúlveda (2006) and Aidt et al. (2008), there is probably a bilateral causal relationship between corruption and average income.
 
6
Dong et al. (2012) utilized both micro- and macro-level data to investigate whether corruption is contagious and conditional cooperation matters. According to their classification, the data obtained from surveys and experiments are at the micro-level, while the data collected from the statistics for a country or an economy are macro-data.
 
8
It is interesting and noteworthy that Lessmann and Markwardt (2010) found that decentralization counteracts corruption in countries that have high degrees of freedom of the press, whereas countries without effective monitoring may suffer from decentralization. As a result, it is necessary to incorporate the freedom of media (Media) and institutional democracy (Democracy) as two control variables in the regression model.
 
9
It must be admitted that the estimation results turn out to be remarkably different from our expectations that women with higher education may be more willing to fight corruption. The estimated results, however, have two important implications. First, in the sample countries, a higher education level received by women does not help to constrain corruption. Second, female officials, especially those with a higher level of education, may even be more corrupt once they seize power in the government.
 
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Metadata
Title
Women and corruption: evidence from multinational panel data
Authors
Yu Hao
Chun-Ping Chang
Zao Sun
Publication date
20-07-2017
Publisher
Springer Netherlands
Published in
Quality & Quantity / Issue 4/2018
Print ISSN: 0033-5177
Electronic ISSN: 1573-7845
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-017-0530-7

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