Objectives: Do people living in more corrupted countries report worse health? We answer this question by investigating the relationship between country-level corruption and the number of chronic diseases for a sample of Europeans aged above 50.
Methods: We link a rich panel dataset on individual health and socio-demographic characteristics with two country-level corruption indices, analyse the overall relationship with pooled ordinary least squares and fixed-effect models, explore heterogeneous effects driven by country and individual factors, and disentangle the effect across different public sectors.
Results: Individuals living in more corrupted countries suffer from a higher number of chronic diseases. The heterogeneity analysis shows that (1) health outcomes are worsened especially for respondents living in relatively low-income countries; (2) the health of females and people with poor socio-economic status is more affected by corruption; (3) the corruption-health negative link mainly occurs for cardiovascular diseases and ulcers; (4) only corrupted sectors linked with healthcare are associated with poorer health.
Conclusions: We inform the policy debate with novel results in establishing a nexus between corruption and morbidity indicators.
Keywords: Chronic diseases; Corruption; Europe; Public health.