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Quantitative relations between corruption and economic factors

  • Interdisciplinary Physics
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Abstract.

We report quantitative relations between corruption level and economic factors, such as country wealth and foreign investment per capita, which are characterized by a power law spanning multiple scales of wealth and investment per capita. These relations hold for diverse countries, and also remain stable over different time periods. We also observe a negative correlation between level of corruption and long-term economic growth. We find similar results for two independent indices of corruption, suggesting that the relation between corruption and wealth does not depend on the specific measure of corruption. The functional relations we report have implications when assessing the relative level of corruption for two countries with comparable wealth, and for quantifying the impact of corruption on economic growth and foreign investment.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Polymer Studies and Department of Physics, Boston University, Boston, MA, 02215, USA

    Jia Shao, Plamen Ch. Ivanov, Boris Podobnik & H. Eugene Stanley

  2. Institute of Solid State Physics, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, 1784, Sofia, Bulgaria

    Plamen Ch. Ivanov

  3. Zagreb School of Economics and Management, 10000, Zagreb, Croatia

    Boris Podobnik

  4. Faculty of Civil Engineering, University of Rijeka, 51000, Rijeka, Croatia

    Boris Podobnik

Authors
  1. Jia Shao
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  2. Plamen Ch. Ivanov
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  3. Boris Podobnik
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  4. H. Eugene Stanley
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Correspondence to Jia Shao.

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Shao, J., Ivanov, P., Podobnik, B. et al. Quantitative relations between corruption and economic factors. Eur. Phys. J. B 56, 157–166 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2007-00098-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2007-00098-2

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