Corruption makes government officials fatter, as they consume more rich food and alcohol. Anti-corruption campaigns cause government officials to lose weight and also disproportionately remove obese officials from office. Countries that are very corrupt are more likely to have obese leaders, such as North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.
As Crémieux observes, “A while back, it was found that, among Russian ministers, obesity and corruption were associated. Then it was found that, across countries, corruption and public officials’ BMIs were associated. Now, an anti-corruption campaign inadvertently reduced officials’ BMIs!”
A recent study in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization discovered that a Chinese “anti-corruption campaign significantly decreased the BMI and overweight rates of pubic sector employees.” That study is titled “A ‘leaner’ government? The effect of China’s anti-corruption campaign on the body weight and health of public sector employees.”
The study is consistent with another study, “Obesity of politicians and corruption in post-Soviet countries,” which found that countries with very fat government ministers such as Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Ukraine, were far more corrupt than countries whose ministers had lower BMIs, such as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Georgia.
The abstract of the study on China explains,
Health is fundamental for bureaucrats to properly perform duties so as to deliver the function of the state. Based on a nationally representative longitudinal survey and using a difference-in-differences identification strategy, we study whether and how the recent anti-corruption campaign in China shapes the body weight and health of public sector employees (PSEs). We find that the anti-corruption campaign significantly decreased the BMI and overweight rates of PSEs. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that the effect is more pronounced among the PSEs who are more exposed to corruption ex ante. Further analyses demonstrate that the mechanisms underlying the BMI reduction effect include decreased frequency of alcohol consumption and eating out as well as increased time spent on exercise among PSEs post-campaign. Finally, we find the reduced BMI among PSEs also leads to better self-assessed health and has broader implications for bureaucratic efficiency and governance quality. Overall, this study offers a novel political economic perspective to shed light on an unintended health consequence of China’s anti-corruption campaign.
The study of corruption in post-Soviet countries states,
We collected 299 frontal face images of 2017 cabinet ministers from 15 post-Soviet states (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan). For each image, the minister’s body-mass index is estimated using a computer vision algorithm. The median estimated body-mass index of cabinet ministers is highly correlated with conventional measures of corruption (Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index, World Bank worldwide governance indicator Control of Corruption, Index of Public Integrity). This result suggests that physical characteristics of politicians such as their body-mass index can be used as proxy variables for political corruption when the latter are not available, for instance at a very local level.
The correlation between obesity and corruption is not perfect. Russia is somewhat more corrupt than Ukraine, and was about as corrupt as Ukraine back in 2017, but Russian ministers were not as fat as Ukrainian ministers, at least back in 2017.
