NO MORALITY, NO MARKET:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0802/p09s02-coop.html>Corruption's drag on democratic states (Christopher Walker and Sanja Tatic, 8/02/06, CS Monitor)

In order to acquire a stronger understanding of the forces at work inhibiting the establishment of democratic governance, Freedom House's study of governance, "Countries at the Crossroads," examines 30 strategically important states around the globe that are struggling to consolidate democratic institutions.

These countries - from Armenia to Malaysia to Zimbabwe - are evaluated on four indicators of good governance: accountability and public voice, civil liberties, rule of law, and anticorruption and transparency. While none of these countries is a strong governance performer overall, performance in anticorruption and transparency was pointedly weak with an average score of 2.71 (on a scale of 0 to 7, with 7 being strongest), more than a full point lower than the strongest overall category (civil liberties). And corruption shows itself to be a resilient and global problem: None of the 30 countries in the study scored above a 4.0 on the anticorruption measure.

Unhappily for most countries, your freedom from corruption is pretty directly correlated to whether your culture is Calvinist.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 1, 2006 6:48 PM