2007/03/01 by Jia Shao, Plamen Ch. Ivanov, Boris Podobnik +1 · 1 voice · 1 citation
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #Corruption and Economic Development #Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance #Culture, Economy, and Development Studies #physics.data-an #physics.soc-ph #q-fin.GN
paper · pdf · doi:10.1140/epjb/e2007-00098-2
published as Eur. Phys. J. B. 56 157-166(2007) · 10 pages, 9 figures
openalex publication_date 2007/03/01 · arxiv created 2007/05/01 · arxiv published 2007/05/01 · arxiv updated 2007/05/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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 investments 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 investments.