Exploring the relationship between corruption and health care services, education services and standard of living

Abstract

Understanding the impact of corruption in modern societies, namely in standard of living, health and education services, is an issue that has attracted increased attention in recent years. This paper examines the relationship between the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) provided by Transparency International and the Human Development Index (HDI) of the United Nations Development Program and its components. The analysis is done for clusters of countries with similar levels of development. For the countries with high levels of development, it was found a negative relationship between corruption and human development. Moreover, for these countries, higher corruption levels are related to poor health care services, poor education services and low standard of living. For the other clusters of countries, these relationships were not statistically significant. The results obtained reinforce the importance of efforts by international politicians and organizations in fighting corruption, particularly in highly developed countries, to promote development. © Springer International Publishing AG 2017.