What Do Corruption Indices Measure?

Dilyan Donchev and Gergely Ujhelyi

Economics and Politics, 2014, vol. 26, issue 2, 309-331

Abstract: type="main" xml:id="ecpo12037-abs-0001">

Evidence from the International Crime Victimization Survey and the World Business Environment Survey suggests that actual corruption experience is a weak predictor of reported corruption perception, and that some of the factors commonly found to “reduce” corruption, such as economic development, democratic institutions or Protestant traditions, systematically bias corruption perception indices downward from corruption experience. In addition, perception indices are influenced by absolute (as opposed to relative) levels of corruption, which tends to penalize large countries, and they exhibit diminishing sensitivity to both absolute and relative corruption, indicating that they may better capture differences among countries with low levels of corruption than among highly corrupt ones. Individual characteristics such as education, age, or employment status, and firm-level characteristics such as the number of competitors are also found to influence corruption perceptions holding experience constant.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (94)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/ecpo.2014.26.issue-2 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:ecopol:v:26:y:2014:i:2:p:309-331

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0954-1985

Access Statistics for this article

Economics and Politics is currently edited by Peter Rosendorff

More articles in Economics and Politics from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().