Comments on: Transparency International Strikes Again

By: MSS

MSS — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 04:10:26 +0000

One thing that stands out with CPI is captured nicely by Doug’s very good overview: No surprises. Doug used that or similar phrases over and over. Indeed, CPI rarely tells us much that we were not expecting. After all, it is based on perceptions.

Cyrus points us in the right direction by talking about outliers in a correlation of CPI with income. We could do the same thing with other correlates, like various indicators of political system type, historical trajectory (as Doug suggests), etc.

But in the end I always come back to those “obvious issues with this methodology.”

By: Kristjan Wager

Kristjan Wager — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 15:05:00 +0000

french swede the rootless vegetable, the CPI numbers you used in your figure (at least according to the textfil) doesn’t seem to fit with the numbers at Transparency International - did you use numbers from an earlier year, or am I missing something?

By: Cyrus

Cyrus — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 22:42:47 +0000

The outliers:

Those that will be high income outliers on almost any GDP vs. whatever plot: Norway, U.S. Luxembourg.

Those that have higher incomes than other countries with similar CPIs: Greece, Italy.

Those that have lower incomes than other countries with similar CPIs: Malaysia, Botswana, Chile, Tunisia.

Now of this last list, Malaysia, Botswana, and Chile, are, or have been, widely publicized the growth markets of their respective regions. But if Tunisia has been called the Maghrebi Tiger, or something like that, I have missed it.

Another observation: the relationship between perceived corruption and income, so clear below CPIs of seven, seems quite weak above 7. Diminishing returns to honesty? Or are people naturally somewhat dishonest, and forcing them to be even more honest than they are inclined to be demands a very costly enforcement effort?

By: Aapo

Aapo — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 04:40:17 +0000

Hmm, I wonder what has happened to Finnish complacency since the only related headline I’ve spotted from our papers was Corruption Is Still Rife in Finland. It was mainly about how its Finnish version is, indeed, not perceived as corruption -that in such a small country everybody knows everybody and it’s rather acceptable to do favours to your old fishing/hunting buddies. Corruption doesn’t have to involve money. But oh well, if it’s worse elsewhere then I guess we’re the least bad.

Tackling corrupting is after all very simple:
a) be small
b) be homogenous
c) go local

It’s not absolutely surprising that Botswana is considered the cleanest in Africa -it’s a land whose borders were not entirely decided by the white man’s pencil and ruler, so they’ve never had too many tribal conflicts.

And then you can take Switzerland, and its grassroot democracy. The Swiss are diverse folk but have always understood to empower their cantons -which makes the process open and creates social cohesion.

And finally you have the Nordics, that have typically been both homogenous and decentralised. Being one happy family where the public money goes through strong municipalities and their local councils -that’s how you do it.

By: FrenchDoc

FrenchDoc — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 08:51:19 +0000

In “The end of poverty”, Jeffrey Sachs does provide a scatterplot with corruption and other economic measures to dispell the myth that African countries are poor because they are corrupt. See page 311 and after.

By: french swede the rootless vegetable

french swede the rootless vegetable — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 08:23:00 +0000

“You know what I’d love to see? I’d love to see some scattergraphs correlating these scores with things like PPP GDP per capita. You’d see a cloud of dots around a rough diagonal line, with scores tending to rise with income. But there’d be interesting outliers on either side.
Surely someone, somewhere must have done this.”

I just did it.
(thx to Mitch above for the data)
Here’s the link to the graph:
http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/view/SThgcEsOtha6p6kKzGIeE2-

Illustrates what you said very well.
Italy and Greece stick out very obviously.

The outliers are the countries with very low corruption, the correlation totally breaks down.

By: french swede the rootless vegetable

french swede the rootless vegetable — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 07:51:15 +0000

I just did it.
(thx to Mitch above for the data)
Here’s the link to the graph:
http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/view/SThgcEsOtha6p6kKzGIeE2-

Illustrates what you said very well.
Italy and Greece stick out very obviously.

The outliers are the countries with very low corruption, the correlation totally breaks down.

By: Hasan Jafri

Hasan Jafri — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 06:38:18 +0000

Sorry, but I hate Beaujolais. Beujolais, a mediocre but slickly packaged swill, is not such a great analogy for the Corruption Pereceptions Index. The CPI is like a fresh, young country wine in Portugal, where a lot of treading still goes on, and young girls stand in tubs and stomp on the grapes. The villagers sing drunkenly and happily, if well. The CPI is unscientific, good fun. We need more reports like this in order to make people pay attention and take notice of corruption.

By: Mitch

Mitch — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 03:58:11 +0000

It’s already done. Please see this post in the Chicago Boyz archives.

http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/004309.html

I may re-do it with the new numbers, but with a correlation that tight, I doubt it will change much.

By: Kristjan Wager

Kristjan Wager — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 17:56:07 +0000

Interesting that there seems to be a correlation between the position on the scale and the GDP. I wonder if there is a similar correlation regarding income inequility and/or median income. I would suspect that there is.