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Can capitalism restrain public perceived corruption? Some evidence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 April 2012

HUGO J. FARIA ,
DANIEL R. MORALES ,
NATASHA PINEDA  and
HUGO M. MONTESINOS
HUGO J. FARIA*
Affiliation:
Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Administración (IESA) Caracas, Venezuela
DANIEL R. MORALES*
Affiliation:
Barna Business School, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
NATASHA PINEDA*
Affiliation:
Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Administración (IESA) Caracas, Venezuela
HUGO M. MONTESINOS*
Affiliation:
Universidad Simón Bolívar (USB) and Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Administración (IESA) Caracas, Venezuela
*
*Email: [email protected], [email protected]
**Email: [email protected], [email protected]
***Email: [email protected], [email protected]
****Email: [email protected]
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Abstract:

A growing body of evidence documents a vast array of economic and social ill-effects of public perceived corruption. These findings and the scant evidence of recent success in the fight against corruption beg the question: how to abate it? We document the existence of a negative, statistically significant and quantitatively large impact of economic freedom (our proxy for institutions of capitalism, markets and competition) on public corruption. This negative response of corruption to economic freedom holds after allowing for non-linearities interacting economic freedom and political rights, endowments, legal families, ethnicity and for robust determinants of corruption uncovered by Daniel Treisman [‘What Have We Learned About the Causes of Corruption From Ten Years of Cross-National Empirical Research?’, Annual Review of Political Science, 10: 211–244], such as income, democracy, freedom of the press and fuel exports. Thus, this paper helps to explain why high-income prosperous countries exhibit low levels of public perceived corruption, and why honesty is a normal good.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Institutional Economics , Volume 8 , Issue 4 , December 2012 , pp. 511 - 535
Copyright
Copyright © Millennium Economics Ltd 2012

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