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Corruption and Geography: Case of Mena Regions

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Country Experiences in Economic Development, Management and Entrepreneurship

Part of the book series: Eurasian Studies in Business and Economics ((EBES,volume 5))

Abstract

In this work we have achieved an empirical estimation for the growth experiences in MENA regions, from 1990 to 2010, by measuring the spatial effects that is related to corruption and geography. We use the institution quality index corruption control (CORR) to measure the absolute location effect owing to country specific institution. We use the latitude of country’s centroid to measure the absolute location effect owing to geography (GEO). The spatial diagnostics indicates that there is a spatial autocorrelation. The obtained results indicate that we have to use the spatial error model rather than the spatial lag model. These effects have been modeled by using spatial error model and by using a spatial weight matrix. In this framework, the corruption control is strongly and positively related to the economic growth rate than the geography. The control of corruption has a dominant role than geographical factor to determine the growth in MENA region. The obtained result confirms the primacy of institutions over geography.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The Euclidean distance is used to measure the distance between the regions, where the cut off is measured by the minimum threshold, which guarantees that each region has at least one neighbour; we give zero to the regions of the diagonal because they cannot be neighbour to themselves.

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Correspondence to Dorsaf Elbir .

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Elbir, D., Goaied, M. (2017). Corruption and Geography: Case of Mena Regions. In: Bilgin, M., Danis, H., Demir, E., Can, U. (eds) Country Experiences in Economic Development, Management and Entrepreneurship. Eurasian Studies in Business and Economics, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46319-3_14

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