Interesting discussion on a Freakonomics podcast about corruption in different countries but mostly comparing corruption in the US and China,
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/chinas-gilded-age/.
From the page's blurb: "Yuen Yuen Ang is a professor of political science at the University of Michigan. She recently published a book called China’s Gilded Age: The Paradox of Economic Boom and Vast Corruption. Her analysis is based on prosecutorial data, government compensation figures, news reports — and her own interviews with more than 400 Chinese bureaucrats. She’s trying to answer several questions about corruption. The main one is this: how has an economy like China’s been able to grow so large and so fast with such high levels of corruption? Economists usually point to corruption as an impediment to economic growth. And corruption in China is famously high, at least according to rankings like the one from Transparency International, a German association that collects corruption data around the world. Some scholars argue that corruption poses an existential threat to China, and president Xi Jinping seems to agree: since he took over, in 2012, he has led a crackdown in which more than 1.5 million government officials have been disciplined, with thousands sent to prison. The United States, meanwhile, ranks much lower on the Transparency International corruption index. But Yuen Yuen Ang says it’s not so straightforward."
