Abstract

While the short-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on lives and livelihoods are well understood, we know little about the effect of the pandemic for longer term outcomes such as corruption. We look at the historical data on economic and political crisis to assess what we can learn from the long-term effects of past crises on corruption. We hypothesise that strong rule of law institutions may ameliorate the possible adverse effects of economic and political crises on corruption. We test our hypotheses using panel data for over hundred countries over 1800-2020. The results suggest heterogenous effects depending on the type of crisis and how we measure it. We find that rule of law institutions can control corruption in cases of political violence and economic slowdown, but the effect is not seen for democracy break downs, coups, armed conflict and civil war and economic crises such as currency and debt crisis.