| This study investigates the impact of trade, foreign direct investment, and foreign aid on perceived levels of political corruption across a broad cross-section of countries. Defining political corruption as the abuse of public power for private gain, this study proposed that closed economies would breed political avarice while greater economic openness would deter it. Hypotheses were tested using bivariate and multivariate regressions. The latter tests controlled for a number of other variables linked to corruption including level of economic development, and sociopolitical and geographic factors. The analyses demonstrated a statistically significant and inverse relationship; that is, more trade, investment, and aid all contribute to lower levels of corruption. A final test to determine causality, however, exposed different linkages and suggested that the relationship between economic integration and political corruption is not in fact one-directional but reciprocal. |
