CORRUPTION Syndromes of Corruption

The international setting 33
extensive corruption; to make the following discussion more intuitive,
I have subtracted scores from ten so that a larger value indicates perceptions
of more corruption.
For the 128 countries appearing on both indices, the simple linear
correlation between HDI and the ‘‘inverted’’ TI index is -.71 (p ¼ .000):
extensive corruption does indeed appear strongly linked with lower levels
of development. But a scatter plot suggests that matters are more complicated
(figure 2.1).
A number of cases in the upper left – Scandinavian countries, New
Zealand, Australia, the UK, and Canada among them – enjoy high levels
of development, democratic politics (Singapore (SIN) and Hong Kong
(HK) are notable exceptions on the latter point), and are perceived as
relatively free of corruption. As we move toward the lower right we find
countries regarded as more corrupt, and facing increasingly serious development
problems. The quadratic regression line suggests that as corruption
increases its costs mount up at an increasing rate.
But the connection is not simple or consistent. Quite apart from
problems with the indices themselves, links to development appear
strongest where corruption is perceived to be least important: as CPI
scores rise the data points are less and less tightly clustered around the
regression line. A large number of societies, arrayed across the top of the
plot, enjoy high levels of development despite widely varying amounts of
apparent corruption. Moreover, affluent Italy (ITA), for example, has a
slightly worse CPI score than much-poorer Botswana (BOT), and ranks
only slightly above Namibia (NAM). Chile (CHL) and Argentina (ARG)
are similar in terms of Human Development, but have very different TI
scores. Indeed, if we leave out the affluent (and reputedly lowcorruption)
market democracies in the top left and focus on those
where corruption is perceived to be most important, the relationship
resists any simple description. There, it seems, we have many different
possible corruption-and-development stories to tell.
Equally intriguing is the blank space in the lower left: there are apparently
few if any low-corruption/low-development societies. It is tempting
to infer that countries in the lower right will move up the development
scale once they bring corruption under control. More likely is that
advanced societies have minimized it in the course of building institutions,
guaranteeing rights and opportunities, and making other basic
changes that have also aided development (Rodrik, 2003) and that help
people pursue and defend their own interests. Development, in turn,
likely creates political and economic alternatives that leave people less
vulnerable to corrupt exploitation. And it is also worth remembering that
HDI scores reflect GDP statistics to a significant extent; in fact, if we