Stephen Welling
Blog 9
Professor Hawkins, below is an assessment of my findings.
For my research I have looked to see if a relationship between economic development and “good governance” exists. To measure economic development I looked at each country’s per capita GDP. On the graph provided per capita GDP is measured in US dollars. I believe this statistic gives the best insight into the living conditions of each country. Looking at GDP alone often times gives a skewed perception as it does not take population into account. For this research we are more concerned how economic prosperity of individuals is influenced by corruption of government. To measure “good governance” I looked at the corruption perceptions index of transparency.org (cite). The corruption perceptions index rates each county’s public sector on a scale of one to ten (cite). A score of one means that the public sector is extremely corrupt, where a score of ten means the public sector is clean and corruption free (cite). I chose this index because it is produced by a reputable organization and gives a good indication of a government’s corruption.
The scatter plot graph provided has a country’s per capita GDP on the x axis and a country’s corruption perceptions index rating on the y axis. Each dot on the graph represents a country. Judging from the graph there does appear to be a strong linear relationship between a country’s per capita GDP and a country’s corruption perceptions index rating. The graph shows that the more corrupt a country’s government is the smaller their per capita GDP will be. This correlation does seem to hold true for almost every country represented in the data. There are two countries that have lower corruption index ratings of 4.5 and 5 but have high per capita GDP’s of over $60,000. These two countries might require some additional explaining. The data does also seems to be rather tight, further proving a strong correlation exists.
Correlation does not always imply causation, however; an influencing relationship does appear to exist