Quantifying the relationship between corruption in education and economic development in the Eastern Europe and Eurasia region: an exploratory literature review

The main objectives of this review were: to (a) validate/confirm the premise that existing scholarly studies have not developed a comprehensive framework and/or a model to quantify the effect of corruption in the education sector on a country's economic development; and (b) to develop such a framework and/or model, if in fact there is no adequate framework currently available. As the work evolved, however, and began to address objective (b), it seemed more appropriate to treat the review as a feasibility study, namely, as an assessment of the extent to which this type of activity had sufficient potential to warrant continued investment in light of recently published materials and other activities underway to address the complex issues of corruption in education and its impact on the overall social fabric of a country, not simply on economic development. The paper begins by describing the indicators of corruption most commonly used for research and country ranking purposes, identifying their strengths and weaknesses. The second section discusses several articles that develop empirical models of corruption and examine its relationship to indicators of educational and national economic development as well as returns to individuals. It points out shortcomings of this approach and argues that developing quantitative indicators of the actual costs of corruption are a precondition to effective mathematical modeling of its effect on economic development. The third section expands the notion of corruption and emphasizes the importance of going beyond basic economic indicators and corruption perception indexes in order to estimate the costs of corruption in education more directly.