The Mental Health Cost of Corruption: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper examines the effect that experiencing corruption has on an individual’s mental health using microeconomic data from the Afrobarometer surveys. The results show a statistically significant and economically meaningful effect in both binary and ordered probit models using both an experience of corruption index and a simple binary variable. Having to pay a bribe to obtain documents and permits, to avoid problems with the police or to access medical care emerge as the arenas in which corruption can have a damaging effect on mental health. Some evidence is presented that an individual needs to experience such corruption more than ‘once or twice’ for this effect to become evident.Mental Health; Corruption; Well-Being; Sub-Saharan Africa

The Effects of Foreign Aid in Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper contributes to the aid effectiveness debate by applying a vector autore- gression model to a panel of Sub-Saharan African countries. This method avoids the need for instrumental variables and allows one to analyse the impact of foreign aid on human development and on economic development simultaneously. The full sample results indicate a small increase in economic growth following a fairly substantial aid shock. The size of the effect puts the result somewhere between the arguments of aid optimists and those of aid pessimists. Economic growth is found to respond more to aid shocks in groups defined by better economic policies, poor institutions and high aid dependence. Human development, for which I use the growth rate of life expectancy as a proxy, responds positively to aid shocks in democracies and in good institutional environments.Foreign Aid, Economic Growth, Human Development, Panel VAR

Open For Business? Institutions, Business Environment and Economic Development

Recent years have seen a significant focus in the literature on growth and development on the idea that legal and political institutions are the key determinant of economic development. The main finding of this paper is that the focus on the primacy of legal and political institutions may be misplaced and that business-friendly economic policies (proxied for here by the World Bank’s Doing Business indicator) are the key determinant of the level of income per capita. We find that a country’s Doing Business rank dominates a range of measures of legal and political institutional quality as an explanatory variable for income per capita. We also find the Doing Business rank to be a key explanatory variable for economic growth and that previous findings assigning a significant role to educational attainment are not robust to the inclusion of this new indicator in growth regressions.

Corruption, Institutions and Regulation

We analyze the effects of corruption and institutional quality on the quality of business regulation. Our key findings indicate that corruption negatively affects the quality of regulation and that general institutional quality is insignificant once corruption is con- trolled for. These findings hold over a number of specifications which include additional exogenous historical and geographic controls. The findings imply that policy-makers should focus on curbing corruption to improve regulation, over wider institutional re- form.Business Regulation; Economic Policy; Institutional Quality; Corruption

The effects of foreign aid in Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper contributes to the aid effectiveness debate by applying a vector autoregression model to a panel of Sub-Saharan African countries. This method avoids the need for instrumental variables and allows one to analyse the impact of foreign aid on human development and on economic development simultaneously. The full sample results indicate a small increase in economic growth following a fairly substantial aid shock. The size of the effect puts the result somewhere between the arguments of aid optimists and those of aid pessimists. Economic growth is found to respond more to aid shocks in groups defined by better economic policies, poor institutions and high aid dependence. Human development, for which I use the growth rate of life expectancy as a proxy, responds positively to aid shocks in democracies and in good institutional environments

Corruption and infrastructure at the country and regional level

This paper examines the relationship between corruption and infrastructure at both the country and regional level using the World Bank’s Enterprise Surveys data. A statistically significant and considerable relationship is established between the measure of corruption in the macro data and the measures of transportation and electricity infrastructure. Countries with more corruption tend to have worse infrastructure. At the regional level, the key result is unchanged. The magnitude and significance of this result is shown to vary by global region. Two stage least squares results, using distance from the equator as an instrument at the macro level support the simple OLS. Finally, it is shown that within country variation in corruption has a significant effect on regional infrastructure

Corruption and Infrastructure at the Country and Regional Level

This paper examines the relationship between corruption and infrastructure at both the country and regional level using the World Bank’s Enterprise Surveys data. A statistically significant and considerable relationship is established between the measure of corruption in the macro data and the measures of transportation and electricity infrastructure. Countries with more corruption tend to have worse infrastructure in the eyes of their firms. This link is shown to remain when one uses other measures of corruption and after controlling for GDP per capita, institutional quality and land area. At the regional level, the key result is unchanged. The magnitude and significance of this result is shown to vary by global region. Two stage least squares results, using distance from the equator as an instrument at the macro level support the simple OLS results and allow us to have some confidence that the causality runs from corruption to infrastructure. Finally, it is shown that within country variation in corruption has a significant effect on regional infrastructure

Political trust, corruption and ratings of the IMF and the World Bank

There are only a handful of studies that examine public support for the IMF and World Bank. At the individual level, evaluations of the economy feature prominently in these studies. Utilizing data from the Afrobarometer study, we find that evaluations of the economy, ideology and a range of socio-demographic factors including age, gender, employment status, health, education, and living conditions are not significantly related to ratings of effectiveness. Rather, we find that political trust and corruption – two very important concepts in the wider literature on individual level attitudes toward international relations and foreign policy issues – are strongly associated with ratings of effectiveness

Shelter in Place? Depends on the Place: Corruption and Social Distancing in American States

This paper investigates the links between corruption and compliance with social distancing during COVID-19 pandemic in America. Both theory and empirical evidence point to a corrosive effect of corruption on trust/social capital which in turn determine people’s behavior towards compliance with public health policies. Using data from 50 states we find that people who live in more corrupt states are less likely to comply with so called shelter in place/stay at home orders