Fairness Pays | Page 10 |
The actual figures for the correlations are given below and it clear that there is a very strong connection between how rich a country is and fairness (defined as being more equal and less corrupt). However they cannot distinguish between cause and effect. Is it unfairness that prevents a country from getting rich, or is it being rich that prevents a country from being unfair? Or is it some other factor which both prevents a country from getting rich and makes them unfair?
For a rich country such as the UK the message is clear: Fairness is a Good Thing. This means that we should:
There are some notable outlyers, where a few countries seem to buck the trend. Most notable is the USA discussed on a separate page. The other two are Greece and Italy, which are discussed in the context of the European Union
In the figures the countries with GDPs of more than 10,000 PPP $US are labelled and the rest indicated by just dots. The correlation factors for the labelled countries is:
Income | Gini | 50% |
Income | Corruption | 80% |
Income | Gini plus Corruption | 85% |
Gini | Corruption | 30% |
The cut-off at 10,000 PPP $US is arbitrary and is justified on the grounds that we are interested in situation of the UK, ie industrialised and relatively well-off. If the range is increased downwards the correlation factors stay the same but the difference between income and corruption alone and corruption plus Gini declines a bit, as would be expected from examining the graphs. This is no doubt due to the increasing difficulty in collecting meaningful values of the parameters in poorer and more chaotic countries.
The correlation between Corruption and Inequality is low, which means that corruption is not a strong cause of inequality nor inequality of corruption. Nor is it likely that a third factor causes both. This comes as bit of a surprise but it does support the idea that inequality and corruption work independently with the same effect; against getting richer.
Page 10