Worldwide clustering of the corruption perception

TL;DR

This study applies hierarchical clustering to analyze corruption perception across 134 countries, revealing four main clusters that correlate strongly with economic development levels.

Contribution

It is the first to use hierarchical clustering methods to analyze corruption perception, uncovering a clear clustering structure linked to development stages.

Findings

Four main clusters of countries based on corruption perception.

Strong correlation between corruption levels and economic development.

Country rankings by corruption align with GDP per capita.

Abstract

We inspect a possible clustering structure of the corruption perception among 134 countries. Using the average linkage clustering, we uncover a well-defined hierarchy in the relationships among countries. Four main clusters are identified and they suggest that countries worldwide can be quite well separated according to their perception of corruption. Moreover, we find a strong connection between corruption levels and a stage of development inside the clusters. The ranking of countries according to their corruption perfectly copies the ranking according to the economic performance measured by the gross domestic product per capita of the member states. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first one to present an application of hierarchical and clustering methods to the specific case of corruption.