The effects of corruption : The effects of corruption at the individual level examined through the corruption perception of the citizens in China and Vietnam

Absztrakt (kivonat)

This paper aims to investigate the effects of corruption perception on the well-being of society in Vietnam and China as both countries have had substantial reforms taking place in recent decades. The study provides insight into the effects of corruption in each country and a comparative analysis between the two given certain historical similarities between both nations. Both quantitative and qualitative methods are employed in the analysing process. Firstly, the research uses SPSS to proceed with the secondary source of data collected from the last wave of the World Value Survey, conducted from 2017 to 2020. Subsequently, the qualitative data is collected by semi-structured interviewing method and analysed by identifying themes and analysing narratives. Results show that the society in the two countries reacts differently although citizens perceive approximately the same level of corruption. The corruption perception does not affect Vietnamese people's happiness and social trust in contrast to the case of China. In both countries, a higher perception of corruption deteriorates public trust. The effect of how people perceive corruption prevalence on the political awareness of the citizens in Vietnam is unclear. For China, the relationship is in line with the hypothesis as people become more neglectful of political issues when they assume a higher level of corruption. Even though the outcome indicates correlating relationships for most of the variables in both countries, it has some unexpected factors that need to be investigated further, leaving the ground for future research.