This blog contains posts and comments written by students in Dr. Tufte's economics classes at Southern Utah University.
4/15/2010
Corruption
We have talked a lot in class about trust of strangers being an integral part of economic growth. I found the following chart very interesting. It is a survey on curruption in different countries around the world. Many of the countries at the very bottom of the list are also the poorest countries in the world. Haiti only scored 1.6 out of 10. With that much corruption how can their economy progress? How can people feel safe investing their money? We cant expect anything diferent from them if all we do is send more money through a long chain of corrupt officials.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
This is interesting data and as a survey it is a good measure of trust, but a poor measure of actual corruption. It is interesting that India and China are growing quickly at about 3.5, while the struggling PIGS counties are all above that, with Ireland even above the US. So, this data although interesting is not indicative of growth.
I found this great article about the effects of corruption in government, specifically the costs. Its written by a man from the Philippines and deals with that government but the ideas are transferable.
http://businessmirror.com.ph/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=24038:poverty-and-corruption&catid=28:opinion&Itemid=64
-1 on Luke for punctuation errors.
One problem with measuring corruption like this, is that sometimes corruption is an optimal response to legal restrictions. Would the world be a better place if a doctor could bribe the DMV to serve them more quickly? I think in a lot of cases it might, and this sort of corruption is worth thinking about more deeply.
Post a Comment