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If you're a cynic then the key goes from cheap (dark colored countries) to expensive (lighter colored countries) corruption.
by iandanforth 13y ago
If you're a cynic then the key goes from cheap (dark colored countries) to expensive (lighter colored countries) corruption.
- carlob 13y agoItaly seems to be an outlier in this respect: faring worse than Portugal, Spain and Turkey. Chile and Uruguay seem to be perceived as less corrupt as their GDP per capita would lead you to think. I think we need a scatterplot! With flags: http://imgur.com/Ld0bXTO http://imgur.com/Ld0bXTO With names: http://imgur.com/vX7dsTV http://imgur.com/vX7dsTV
- sentenza 13y agoThis is not a surprise, though. While I'm not Italian myself, I can attest that Italy (more specifically: The south of Italy) has a Europe-wide reputation for corruption. It seems that things have been getting better lately, or maybe the perception of corruption in Italy was overblown. Who knows? Anyway, with this in mind, I'd take the color of Italy as a positive sign, namely that it is not too dark, on its way to yellow bliss.
- araes 13y agoVery cool, and illuminating. I'm actually a little surprised to see that lower corruption correlates so well with higher income. Admittedly, I could believe that part of that is a self selecting phenomena - IE, people with money immigrate to non-corrupt places. It may also be that alot of the money that's corrupting the cheap places is flowing from the wealthy ones.
- ahomescu1 13y agoI believe corruption and poverty have a circular cause-effect relationship. Corruption causes poverty (by moving money into the pockets of the corrupt) and prevents people from raising economically, forcing many to become corrupt themselves (when your only option of making middle- or upper-class money are bribes and theft).
- carlob 13y agoFirst of all this is perceived corruption and not corruption. Secondly I think it's fairly trivial that often corruption is borne out of a need. I think people emigrate a lot less than you'd think.
- araes 13y agoOn the first, the implied assumption is that perceived corruption correlates reasonably well to actual. (I haven't proven) Don't disagree with the general second statement. Sure, corruption can come about because of an unmet need. It's market forces at work when the market won't respond. But the implied point that the higher per capita income results in less met needs doesn't seem intuitively obvious, since purchasing power often rises at near parity with PC Income. Several places perceived as corrupt on this list actually have better purchasing power per (money unit) than the US.
- chc 13y agoI don't understand how you're pricing corruption like this. The Chinese get a discount on their corruption? What does that mean?
- iandanforth 13y agoYep a given unit of corruption costs more in lighter countries! Lets use the metric of a parking ticket. To bribe your way out of a parking ticket in China might cost RMB100 but $16 won't buy you squat in the US. In fact you'd have to pay way more than the face value of a ticket to get it cleared. Also let's say you want to get away with murder, well that's about 100K parking tickets worth of bribery, but it's much more affordable in the darker countries than in the light.
- rayiner 13y agoThat's not inconsistent nor particularly cynical. It's Econ 101: if you make something more expensive, all else being equal there will be less of it.