The gender‐corruption nexus in Asia

Abstract

This study investigates the relationship between the share of women in parliament and the level of corruption in a panel of Asian countries during the period 1997–2015. This study applies the instrumental variable (IV) fixed effect approach using a system of gender quotas, which are either reserved seats, legal candidate quotas, or voluntary political party quotas as instruments to control for unobserved heterogeneity across countries, and to alleviate endogeneity bias. In addition, the generalised method of moments (GMM) estimator is applied in order to address the persistence of corruption, which causes biased and inefficient estimators in estimation. The main finding is that a higher share of women in parliament is associated with a lower level of corruption, which is consistent with evidence from studies by Dollar et al. (2001) and Swamy et al (2001).

How African Kinship System Contributes to Corruption in Kenya

“…Only 9% of the female respondents argued that there is gender favouritism in Machakos county public service; and 20% of Open Journal of Social Sciences the male respondents argued that gender influences corruption in Machakos County Public Service. This finding contradicts an earlier finding by Paweenawat (2018) which investigated the relationship between the share of women in parliament and the level of corruption in Asian countries during the period of 1997-2015 and found out that a larger number of women in parliament is associated with a lower level of corruption.…”

Gender inequality, corruption, and economic development

“…These include evidence found in developing countries (Samimi & Hosseinmardi, 2011), transition countries (Michailova & Melnykovska, 2009), Mexican states (Grimes & Wängnerud, 2012; Wängnerud, 2010), developed countries (Chen, 2013), democratic‐leaning countries (Esarey & Chirillo, 2013; Esarey & Schwindt‐Bayer, 2019), democratic‐leaning countries with high electoral accountability (Esarey & Schwindt‐Bayer, 2018), and Asian countries (Paweenawat, 2018). Some of these studies have employed instrumental variable techniques and/or controlled for fixed effects, thereby providing further evidence of causality (Chen, 2013; Esarey & Schwindt‐Bayer, 2018, 2019; Jha & Sarangi, 2018; Paweenawat, 2018). Grimes and Wängnerud (2012) and Esarey and Schwindt‐Bayer (2019) also found evidence of a two‐way causal relationship between women in politics and corruption.…”

“…Our theory is based on the seminal studies by Dollar et al (2001) and Swamy et al (2001) and subsequent studies (Chen, 2013;Esarey & Chirillo, 2013;Esarey & Schwindt-Bayer, 2018, 2019Grimes & Wängnerud, 2012;Jha & Sarangi, 2018;Michailova & Melnykovska, 2009;Paweenawat, 2018;Samimi & Hosseinmardi, 2011;Treisman, 2007;Wängnerud, 2010) which found a negative correlation between women in politics and corruption using country/state-level studies. However, based on evidence from individual-level studies, there is no consensus on the proposition that women are intrinsically more honest than men (Alhassan-Alolo, 2007;Alatas et al, 2009;Bowman & Giligan, 2008;Debski et al, 2018;Esarey & Chirillo, 2013;Goetz, 2007;Lee & Guven, 2013;Mukherjee & Gokcekus, 2004;Schulze & Frank, 2003;Torgler & Valev, 2010;Rivas, 2013;Vijayalakshmi, 2008).…”