A Good Turn Deserves Another: Political Stability, Corruption and Corruption-Control

Arbeitspapier

We build on existing literature and contemporary challenges to African development to assess the role of political stability in fighting corruption and boosting corruption-control in 53 African countries for the period 1996-2010. We postulate that on the one hand, an atmosphere of political instability should increase the confidence of impunity owing to less corruption-control. On the other hand, in the absence such impunity from corruption, political instability further fuels corruption. Our findings validate both hypotheses. Hence, contrary to a stream of the literature, we establish causal evidence of a positive (negative) nexus between political stability/no violence and corruption-control (corruption). The empirical evidence is based on Generalized Methods of Moments. The findings are robust to contemporary and non-contemporary quantile regressions. The political stability estimates are consistently significant with decreasing (increasing) magnitudes throughout the conditional distributions of corruption (corruption-control). In other words, the positive responsiveness of corruption-control to political stability is an increasing function of corruption-control while the negative responsiveness of corruption to political stability is a decreasing function of corruption. Simply put: a good turn deserves another.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: AGDI Working Paper ; No. WP/15/039

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; National Security; Economic Nationalism ; Illegal Behavior and the Enforcement of Law ; Formal and Informal Sectors; Shadow Economy; Institutional Arrangements ; Economywide Country Studies: Africa ; Capitalist Systems: Political Economy
• Subject: Fragility ; Corruption ; Conflicts ; Africa

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Asongu, Simplice A. ; Nwachukwu, Jacinta C.
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): African Governance and Development Institute (AGDI)
• (where): Yaoundé
• (when): 2015

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/123688
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:42 AM CET