Is Corruption Bad for Environmental Sustainability? A Cross-National Analysis.

By S. Morse. 2006

120 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper explores the hypothesis that higher levels of corruption are detrimental to environmental sustainability. It does this by employing the Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI) and its component variables and indicators as promoted by the World Economic Forum and the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) created by Transparency International (TI). Both the CPI and ESI were shown to be statistically significantly related to income (proxied as GDP/capita) such that environmental sustainability declined with decreasing income while corruption worsened. The ESI for 2002 was also divided into indicators representing pressure, state, impact and response (i.e., the PSIR framework), and each of these were regressed onto a 'residual CPI' (CPI of 2002 with the influence of income removed). The results suggest that for the most part the pressure, state and impact indicators of the ESI are not correlated with 'residual' CPI. The only statistically significant relationships with 'residual CPI' were for those of the response indicators of the ESI, although even here the R2 values were low (< 20%). Corruption was found to reduce any positive contribution from the response indicators towards environmental sustainability. However, great care needs to be taken when drawing conclusions from the sort of highly aggregated (spatially as well as mathematically) indices as the ESI and CPI.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Nature and Landscape Conservation, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8cdc4f1a83f43619053e8c48807460280a6c78fe

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Citations in the corpus

The political drivers of renewable energies policies (2016, result): “A number of other empirical studies (Fredriksson, Vollebergh, 2009; Morse 2006; Welsh, 2004) broadly confirm these theoretical predictions using different samples, measures of governance quality and diffusion of lobbies as well as estimating techniques.”
Quality of Government: What You Get (2009, result): “For instance, while Morse (2006) finds that corruption has a negative correlation with environmental sustainability (as measured by the Environmental Sustainability Index [ESI]), Ewers and Smith 69 Global Corruption Report 2008, p. xxiv 25 (2007) obtain an opposite result using the Ecological…”