Obesity of politicians and corruption in Ukraine in 2000–2020– Reply

Abstract

We collected 469 frontal face images of Ukrainian cabinet ministers who were in office in 2000–2020. For each image, the minister's body mass index was estimated using a computer vision algorithm. The time series of median estimated body mass index of cabinet ministers co‐moves over time with two existing measures of corruption – World Bank worldwide governance indicator Control of Corruption, and the discrepancy between the quantity of luxury wristwatches exported from Switzerland to Ukraine (reported by Swiss statistics) and the corresponding quantity imported by Ukraine from Switzerland (reported by Ukrainian statistics).

The effect of corruption on microfinance loan portfolio: A semiparametric analysis

“…For ease of interpretation, in our analysis, we use the inverse value of CPI score such that higher values indicate high perceived corruption, and vice versa, in a country. Our use of CPI as a measurement of corruption is consistent with the literature in the area of corruption (Blavatskyy, 2021;Egger & Winner, 2005;Habib & Zurawicki, 2002;Jian et al, 2017). We also use an alternative measurement of corruption as a robustness check.…”

The Neighborhood Effect on Perceptions of Corruption: Comparative Spatial Autocorrelation Analysis

“…This may be explained by the fact that obesity is more common in economically developed countries, where pursuing personal benefits through corruption is less necessary. In relatively less corrupt countries, where politicians are slimmer, the electorate is more likely to suffer from obesity [Blavatskyy 2021]. The Bivariate Moran's index for this pair of indicators is 0.259, and the ISI is 0.125, indicating that the spatial factor plays a role in the distribution of this phenomenon.…”