Eur. Phys. J. B 56, 157-166 (2007)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2007-00098-2

Quantitative relations between corruption and economic factors

¹ Center for Polymer Studies and Department of Physics, Boston University, Boston, MA, 02215, USA
² Institute of Solid State Physics, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, 1784 Sofia, Bulgaria
³ Zagreb School of Economics and Management, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia
⁴ Faculty of Civil Engineering, University of Rijeka, 51000 Rijeka, Croatia

Corresponding authors: ^a jiashao@bu.edu plamen@buphy.bu.edu

Received: 21 December 2006
Revised: 6 March 2007
Published online: 12 April 2007

Abstract

We report quantitative relations between corruption level and economic factors, such as country wealth and foreign investment per capita, which are characterized by a power law spanning multiple scales of wealth and investment per capita. These relations hold for diverse countries, and also remain stable over different time periods. We also observe a negative correlation between level of corruption and long-term economic growth. We find similar results for two independent indices of corruption, suggesting that the relation between corruption and wealth does not depend on the specific measure of corruption. The functional relations we report have implications when assessing the relative level of corruption for two countries with comparable wealth, and for quantifying the impact of corruption on economic growth and foreign investment.