The Causal Relationship between Corruption and Human Poverty Index: The Case of MENA Countries

The investigation of corruption perception effect on the poverty and income inequality is one of the main issues in the economic literature in a way that a myriad of empirical studies have been conducted in this area within recent years. For this purpose، the main objective of this paper is to investigate the causal relationship between human poverty index and corruption perception index for MENA countries over the period of 2003-2011. To conduct this purpose، the empirical model has been estimated by a dynamic panel data approach and GMM estimator. The main results of study reveal that، there is bidirectional causality between corruption perception index and human poverty index in these countries. Hence the improvement of corruption perception index could be enhence the human poverty index and the outher way round.