Corruption, Growth, and the Environment: A Cross-Country Analysis

Heinz Welsch

No 357, Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research

Abstract: The relationship between per capita income and a number of pollution indicators has been found to display an inverted U-shaped or downward-sloping pattern. Corruption may affect this relationship in two distinct ways: by raising pollution at given income levels (direct effect) and by reducing per capita income (indirect effect). The total effect is ambiguous a priori. Using cross section data for several indicators of pollution, the paper estimates the direct and the indirect effect of corruption on pollution. The indirect effect via income is positive or negative depending on the income level. If negative, the indirect effect is dominated by the positive direct effect. Overall, our measures of pollution are monotonically increasing in corruption. Because this relationship is particularly strong at low income levels, developing countries can considerably improve both their economic and environmental performance by reducing corruption.

Keywords: corruption; growth; pollution; environmental Kuznets curve (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K4 O1 Q2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 p.
Date: 2003
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-law and nep-res
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.40636.de/dp357.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Corruption, growth, and the environment: a cross-country analysis (2004)
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:diw:diwwpp:dp357

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bibliothek ().