Correlation Between Corruption and Education in Developing Countries

Title: Correlation Between Corruption and Education in Developing Countries Abstract: Cross-country empirical studies that analyze the relationship between corruption perception and education indicators are abundant. In this study, I use the PISA outcomes to proxy for education quality as well as other education indicators and regress them with two different corruption measures and control variables. Running GLS on the standardized mean values of the PISA results shows that lower corruption is associated with an increase in the PISA scores for math (0.23 σ), science (0.20 σ), and reading (0.29 σ) across countries; however, these coefficients are not statistically significant after controlling for fixed effects and other control variables. Dropout rates show a stronger relationship (-3.15). In addition, I use other educational indicators such as enrollment and schooling years to study the effect of corruption in the access to education and human capital stock. Using interactions in my regressions show worse PISA outcomes for developing countries in general