The topic of corruption is a heavily debated issue that can influence much of a countries relations with its people. Looking at the article by Dr. Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Max Roser, survey data has been measured by taking the average of many expert opinions on which regions have corruption on a 0-100 scale within the Corruption Perception Index, 0 being the most corrupt and 100 being the “cleanest.” To better visualize this data, the authors provide a graph of multiple ways to measure corruption in various regions, such as institutions, political parties, and bribes. The website also has a feature that contains region-specific data to better dissect the statistics of a region. For example, the Democratic Republic of Congo can be viewed in a line graph format that spans across 6 years, slightly fluctuating in corruption.

A trend that I noticed in the graphs is that corruption is mainly concentrated in most developing countries. This may also be attributed to the type of governments in which people are subject to limitations on freedoms of speech and development as a whole. For example, the United States has more democratic policies that seek to keep the country’s leadership accountable for any missteps in the system. This means that people are able to speak up about issues that affect populations to raise awareness and eventually accommodate for the population through legislation. On the other hand, corrupt governments such as Somalia, function under the guise of a republic when in reality, power is in the hands of an elite few, which led to missing around $70 million that was not on record in 2012.

Something that shocked me when reading about corruption across the globe is how perceptions of corrupt governments in which individuals live may be considered normal “transactions” of everyday life. As evidenced by the perception rating of Sudan in the graph, correlations between corruption and perception of corruption are not exact as many people in Sudan do not align themselves with expert opinion. With this in mind, the idea is that corruption can be perpetuated if people in a population are not aware of its existence. Furthermore, this connects to our reading of Development as Freedom because it has empirical linkages of corruption and development. Sen suggests that political participation can only be enhanced through fundamental freedoms of having good healthcare and lower mortality rates, which usually depend on how institutions treat these issues in policymaking. This can be observed regarding India’s independence, which can be attributed to the absence of famine ever since independence was achieved.