I was on the Economic Freedom Index and was somewhat surprised by the Freedom from Corruption Score for certain countries. Here is what I saw:
Denmark - 94.0
Sweden - 93.0
Finland - 94.0
Norway - 90.0
Considering that these states have massive government intervention shouldn’t there be more corruption?
So, basically because the EFI says they’re less corrupt, that means it’s true?
And, how exactly are they defining “corruption”? Better yet, how are they measuring it? Those countries do have a combined population that is a small fraction of the US. I imagine their government sectors are quite smaller by number of public employees. Perhaps “less government workers = less corruption”?
Not necessarily. I would say that it’s more of a function of the culture and ethics of the society.
Isn’t government itself just a corruption that violates natural law? How can a thing like the state have a “percentage” of corruption when the state itself lives on it?
I suppose that would be the reason. It would make sense that the homogenous population of 5 million or so will be more inclined to not tolerate corruption like citizens of a small town would.
Those coutries are small. Smaller countries have better functioning bureaucracies because they have less people (less people in generaql means less people to manage which means less data to pour over). The governments might do a whole lot, which might tempt you to call it more government, but it isn’t exactly true.
The more bureaucrats there are the more corruption there will be. It is the quantity of people that will translate to more or less corruption and it will not be limited to government. The same will go for churches, corporations, ngos, banks, etc..
Now, the quality, or level, of corruption is a different thing. But, the quantity function woud play into it as well (the more people in government, the more likely there is to be an especially corrupt one).
This kind of thing is why people will not converse with libertarians. This place is like a broken record. Asking things (rhetorical device) like that is preahing to the choir. You don’t need to continuously repeat things like this every fucking thread. it makes it impossible to get past. (It is the same as “subjective value” when inquiring about cultural norms et al).
I see. Diseconomies of Scale.
North Korea: 10.0
Neodoxy, if this was a question your post would be the answer.
Ballin’
Are you also shot callin’?
The problem is with your government metrics.
You are basically taking the Budget-GDP ratio as a proxy to the “size of government”.
This is very flawed. Some countries are literally tyrannies without necesseraly having large official budgets. All African countries and to a lesser extent, Russia, China and most of Latin America (with the exception of Chile) follow such pattern.
And Scandinavia and Switzerland have high Budget-GDP ratios, but their governments are very small, in the sense of disposable political power.
The main reason is because government there is very local. Most decisions about spending public money are taken by local officials who are held accountable by their neighbors, and not by some nameless electorate.
In the case of Switzerland descentralization was the main theme since the inception of the Confoederatio Helvetica in the middle ages. As for the northern countries, it’s mainly an indirect consequence of their populations being small and concentrated in a few locations.
Centralized governments tend to be more corrupt and pervasive because the consequential players are federal level representatives and bureaucrats safely insulated from their constituencies and therefore able to pull all sorts of scams.
Germany is also less corrupt than France and Britain due to similar reasons, eventhough all of them are very centralized.
So it’s not something cultural, since corruption was very intense in the DDR and the Weimarer Republik/Deutsches Reich, because of centralization.
A Budget-GDP ratio metric does not capture this. Actually a Budget-GDP ratio is not useful for comparisons between different systems, since other variables play a larger role. It’s used mainly because it’s simple to compute and understand, and not because it’s meaninful.
Agree with ToxicAssets. Additionally, those four countries have something that’s close to a balanced budget.
Good thing AE tends to be hyper skeptical / apathetic of probably any method used to achieve such results - it probably doesn’t pass a test of basic subjectivism
For your information, I’m actually working on SPSS. I could perform some multiple regression, and/or partial/part correlation if you wish. I have some data. For economic freedom, there is the commonly used “Economic Freedom of the World” (the 2012 Annual Report is the one I would like to use). Here’s the link. For the index of corruption, the only one I have found, and also often used in a peer-reviewed paper (to my knowledge), is the Corruption Perception Index also known as (CPI). Here’s the link. I know of no better measure of corruption. If you have some suggestions, I could add those (better) data in my SPSS file. But for now, I haven’t yet finished writing all the data in my files. The economic freedom index in the link has five component, + a summary ratings. In another words, 6 values for each countries, and I want the years too, (i.e., 1985, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005, 2010). So this means 12 values for each countries. It takes a lot of time to type those figures and check if I reported them right.
If you wish, I will post the results later.
Wow, walked into that one.
I’ll take your word on it
““I know of no better measure of corruption.””
whats wrong with using the total amount of expenditures added to the total amount of revenue collected?
So as promised, I posted my results in this thread. Briefly, more freedom is not associated with higher corruption.
Their governments are not trying to govern the entire planet.
