Countries Fighting More against Corruption Possess Higher GDP Growth Rates

In order to investigate whether government regulations against corruption can aect the country growth, we analyze foreign direct investments received by world countries and nd a statistically signican t power-law functional dependence between foreign direct investment per capita and the corruption level measured by the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). On average, an increase of one unit CPI due to government gh t against corruption increases the annual GDP per capita growth rate by 1%. We introduce a new indicator which we call Honesty per Dollar to quantify corruption in term of dollar. Corruption, dened as abuse of public power for private benet, is a global phenomenon that aects almost all aspects of social and economic life. Examples of corruption include the sale of government property by public ocials, bribery, embezzlement of public funds, patronage and nepotism. The World Bank estimates that over 1000 billion USD annually are lost due to corruption, representing 5% of the world GDP. The African Union estimates that due to corruption, African continent loses 25% of GDP. According to the World bank, corruption is the main reason why poor countries remain poor. Governance and corruption are related. In weakly-governed countries especially poor people are aected, because they cannot aord something that is expected to be free (e.g., public health clinics) because in corrupt countries bribes are needed in order to receive public service. By contrast, in well