Mapped: The strange link between obesity and corruption
Country-level corruption is a tough KPI to quantify. So how do organizations like Transparency International and the World Bank do it? Not by comparing the fiscal, economic, and financial data of each country — they’d only end up comparing (rotten) apples to (spoiled) oranges.
Instead, to arrive at their Corruption Perceptions Index and Control of Corruption Indicator (respectively), they aggregate the opinions of experts in governance and corruption.
In 2020, Pavlo R. Blavatskyy, a professor of economics at Montpelier Business School in France, suggested a yardstick for country-level corruption that’s possibly more straightforward, but certainly more unexpected and more fun: the median body mass index (BMI) of a country’s government ministers.
Blavatskyy postulated that there is a positive relationship between the median BMI and a country’s level of government corruption. In plain English: If your country’s top officials tend toward obesity, your country is more corrupt, and vice versa.
