The historical origins of corruption in the developing world: a comparative analysis of East Asia

A new approach has emerged in the literature on corruption in the developing world that breaks with the assumption that corruption is driven by individualistic self-interest and, instead, conceptualizes corruption as an informal system of norms and practices. While this emerging neo-institutionalist approach has done much to further our understanding of corruption in the developing world, one key question has received relatively little attention: how do we explain differences in the institutionalization of corruption between developing countries? The paper here addresses this question through a systematic comparison of seven developing and newly industrialized countries in East Asia. The argument that emerges through this analysis is that historical sequencing mattered: countries in which the "political marketplace" had gone through a process of concentration before universal suffrage was introduced are now marked by less harmful types of corruption than countries where mass voting rights where rolled out in a context of fragmented political marketplaces. The paper concludes by demonstrating that this argument can be generalized to the developing world as a whole

Internetnutzer und Korruptionswahrnehmung: Eine ökonometrische Untersuchung

The current work focuses on the economics of corruption, with an emphasis on the influence of internet users and press freedom on the perception of corruption. An analysis of crosssectional data obtained for 113 countries in 2010 was implemented by means of a generalized linear model involving a gamma-distributed dependend variable (Gamma-GLM), which is known to be superior to the frequently used weighted least square-method. Results revealed that both determinants, i.e. internet use, and press freedom, have isolated and economically significant effects on the way corruption is perceived. In particular, internet users seem to shape the perception, as reflected in an effect which was two times larger than the effect of press freedom. While the impact of these factors on the true corruption remains to be explored in detail, their influence on corruption perception could be identified as nonlinear