IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/imf/imfwpa/2023-220.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Corruption Kills: Global Evidence from Natural Disasters

Author

Listed:
  • Mr. Serhan Cevik
  • João Tovar Jalles

Abstract

Natural disasters are inevitable, but humanitarian and economic losses are determined largely by policy preferences and institutional underpinnings that shape the quality of public infrastructure (including emergency responses and healthcare services) and govern business practices and the adherence to building codes. In this paper, we empirically investigate whether corruption increases the loss of human lives caused by natural disasters, using a large panel of 135 countries during the period 1980–2020. The econometric analysis provides convincing evidence that corruption increases the number of disaster-related deaths, after controlling for economic, demographic, healthcare and institutional factors. That is, the higher the level of corruption in a given country, the greater the number of fatalities as a share of population due to natural disasters. Our results show that the devastating impact of corruption on loss of human lives caused by natural disasters is significantly greater in developing countries, which are even more vulnerable to nonlinear effects of corruption.

Suggested Citation

  • Mr. Serhan Cevik & João Tovar Jalles, 2023. "Corruption Kills: Global Evidence from Natural Disasters," IMF Working Papers 2023/220, International Monetary Fund.
    • Handle: RePEc:imf:imfwpa:2023/220
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=539659
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Corruption; institutions; natural disasters; fatalities; policy preference; business practice; time effect; effects of corruption; country effect; Infrastructure; Global;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:imf:imfwpa:2023/220. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Akshay Modi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/imfffus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.