Hi, guys. Welcome back to lecture six of module three. We are looking at the economic development of nations and we've just discussed religion. We're now going to move to a sixth answer to our question. What factors cause the differences across the world in economic development? This answer is something very important because it is something that countries can excuse me, work on, that they can develop policies around and I think that there's widespread agreement that there's room for improvement across the world in this. Many people who live across the world have wondered if corruption plays a role in the development, or the lack of development in some economies over time. What do we mean by corruption? Well, there are lots of definitions. We are generally talking about abuse of power for private gain. For example, a government official receiving some type of monetary benefit that also benefits another entity but hurts the rest of society. This this type of behavior is actually quite common across the world. And some, some have sought to rank countries according to their level of corruption and so I want to point you to that at this point. I would like to show you a ranking of countries and across the world. This is from an entity called Transparency International. And the higher the score on this the less the corrupt the country. And so we see at the top once again, many of our Scandinavian nations like Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Norway, which, lead the way with, very, fair systems of, economic government, in other words, less corruption, less public sec-, sector corruption. Or perceived levels of public sec, sector corruption, so this means less bribes fewer no-bid contracts, fewer abuses of power in the public sector. This could range range from bribes to get a. To get out of a police, a ticket from the police, or to obtain a construction license, or to start a business, or to anything to a very expensive set of corrupt agreements for a multibillion dollar country to invest in, a company to invest in the country. We see other countries that are on the, list of wealthy nations like Canada, Luxembourg, the United States, Japan. And, so, there does seem to be so far, some correlation, between, lack of corruption and, economic, wealth. Let's continue to scroll down and see let's go to the bottom, and see if we see any correlation. We see Mexico there at number 106 tied. We're starting to see some African nations. We're seeing we see Russia. We see some other Latin American nations and continue to see some African nations. So there, there's a great diversity across the world in corruption as well. This is a particularly important aspect of not only culture but political system that countries must work on if they expect to develop economically. Sometimes the citizen's ability of an indignation is somewhat limited to fight corruption. Sometimes corruption is so pervasive and so bad that it, it requires a very significant change to overcome past, the past history of corruption. Let me give you one example. Some have called some of the economies in some parts of Africa kleptocracies, where the systems of government exist solely or almost entirely to extract wealth from the country for the benefit of a very few government leaders in power. And so, no matter what you do in terms of education or even natural resources, and no matter what you do with political systems, these forms of government have historically not even existed to try to develop economically. They have existed to extract wealth, perhaps from these natural resources. So clearly if if a government is overly corrupt or entirely corrupt, you won't expect much in terms of economic wealth development. And that ends our sixth explanation of the factors that lead to economic development. We'll see you next time for a final wrap-up.