Corruption perception indices: A comparative analysis

Abstract

An attempt has been made to examine the significance of various corruption indices that are used in current empirical literature, especially with regard to the causes of corruption. The primary purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that these corruption indices not only produce similar results but also that the results are consistent over time. I approach this task by first presenting rank correlation coefficients among these indices and then categorising countries into three groups to analyse their rankings over time. Finally, I regress these indices on the same set of independent variables for a common set of countries. The results reveal that these indices are correlated among each other and are stable over time.