Income Shocks and Corruption in Africa: Does a Virtuous Cycle Exist?

Maarten Voors (), Erwin Bulte and Richard Damania

Journal of African Economies, 2011, vol. 20, issue 3, 395-418

Abstract: Empirical evidence suggests that governance quality is a key driver of economic growth and that, in turn, higher incomes might have a positive causal effect on the quality of governance. Such complementarity could invite virtuous cycles of development. Using a measure of corruption as our proxy for the quality of governance, and rainfall as an instrument for income, we explore this issue and find evidence to the contrary. For a panel of African countries, positive income shocks on average tend to invite extra corruption. Closer inspection, however, reveals that this result can be attributed to the most corrupt countries. Conversely, countries with a sufficiently low level of corruption can escape the detrimental effect of income booms on corruption and may actually experience a virtuous cycle of development. Copyright 2011 , Oxford University Press.

Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jae/ejr011 (application/pdf)
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:oup:jafrec:v:20:y:2011:i:3:p:395-418

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of African Economies is currently edited by Francis Teal

More articles in Journal of African Economies from Centre for the Study of African Economies Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().