Good Governance

     Professor Hawkins, this report is on my finding for the correlation between a countries level of economic development and corruption in the government. The two indicators that I selected to draw my report from are GDP PPP in current international currency (Worldbank), and corruption as rated by Transparency International (Transparency).

     My reasoning for choosing these two indicators is because I believe they will give the best information in relation to what I am researching. GDP PPP is a measure of the goods and services produced by a country in currency. I chose this for my economic development indicator, because the higher GDP that a country has, the more developed its’ economy should be. For corruption, I went to Transparency International and used their data for the amount of corruption that they have measured for a countries government. My data for both points comes from the 2011 year, having the most recent data that covers an entire year. The scale for the economy is in units per country, and for corruption, each country was ranked on a 10 point scale, with 10 being the least corrupt, and 1 being the most corrupt.

     The graph, while not perfect, shows what can be called a clear trend between the amount of corruption in a country and its’ economic development as based on GDP PPP. Starting in the bottom left of the graph are countries with the lowest amount of GDP PPP and the highest corruption scores. We can see that there are very few deviations from the cluster. The few countries that are corrupt but have higher GDP PPP’s are the countries that have very valuable resources that the rest of the world wants. Most of these countries are the oil producers in the Middle East. As the corruption scale heads towards 10, or less corrupt, on average the countries have higher GDP PPP’s, meaning a higher level of economic development. As the graph progresses, it gives a linear correlation between the two indicators, albeit one that is not tight along a particular line, but still showing a linear progression.

     I believe that we are able to see from the graph that as a government deals less in corruption, on average, the economy of that country will be at a higher level as compared to similar countries of size and population. It is my theories that as governments deal less with corruption, the less likely that government is going to tolerate corruption in its lower levels. With less corruption in a country, the more likely that country is to have its people going out and gaining jobs in respected workforces, leading to more money in the economy and amongst the people. This growth will continue to spread and help people at all levels increase in wealth and further the advancement of the country’s economy. In contrast, a government that deals heavily in corruption will produce a country less likely to succeed. Due to corruption, officials and citizens alike will be more likely to fight amongst themselves, leading to less people working towards long term goals of progress.

Works Cited

World dataBank. "World Development Indicators (WDI) & Global Development Finance (GDF)." databank.worldbank.org.

Transparency International. "Corruption Perceptions Index 2011." http://cpi.transparency.org/cpi2011/results/.