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Corruption kills
On the anniversary of Haiti’s devastating quake, Nicholas Ambraseys and
Roger Bilham calculate that 83% of all deaths from building collapse in earthquakes
over the past 30 years occurred in countries that are anomalously corrupt.
activities that reduce costs and thereby
compromise the quality of structures. The
assembly of a building, from the pouring
of foundations to the final coat of paint, is
a process of concealment, a circumstance
ideally suited to the omission or dilution of
expensive but essential structural compo-
nents. Reports of the spontaneous collapse
of new buildings testify to a lack of con-
struction oversight (for example, Shanghai,
27 June 2009; Delhi, 15 November 2010).
During earthquakes, the consequences of
decades of shoddy construction are revealed
on a catastrophic scale1,2,4,11.
The analysis we present here is a sequel
often also the most corrupt. To try to isolate
these influences, we quantified a global rela-
tionship between national corruption
8
and
a nation’s per capita income9. It s howe d that
some nations are more corrupt than antici-
pated. It is in these countries that about 83%
of all deaths from earthquakes in the past
three decades have occurred.
The construction industry — currently
worth US$7.5 trillion annually and expected
to more than double in the next decade — is
recognized as being the most corrupt seg-
ment of the global economy10. Corruption
takes the form of bribes to subvert inspec-
tion and licensing processes, and of covert
T
he six-digit death toll from last year’s
Haiti earthquake compared with the
absence of any fatalities in New Zea-
land’s identical magnitude (7) earthquake
was a stark reminder that poor building
practices are largely to blame for turning
moderate earthquakes into major disasters.
Earthquake-resistant construction depends
on responsible governance, but its implemen-
tation can be undermined by corruption
1–5
or
by poverty, through the use of substandard
materials and assembly methods, or through
the inappropriate siting of buildings6,7.
The effects of these forces are difficult to
tease apart, because the poorest nations are
medicine A plan to overhaul
the disappointing search for
biomarkers p.156
oceans Governance struggles
to protect and exploit seas
under pressure p.158
neuroscience Exhibition
explores the wonders of
the brain p.161
communication A call to
evaluate the quality of
outreach p.162
L. ABASSI/MINUSTAH/GETTY IMAGES
Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 2010.
13 JANUARY 2011 | VOL 469 | NATURE | 153
COMMENT
© 2011 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved
to a report on the mitigation of earth-
quake losses that one of us (N.A.) wrote in
1976 for the United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization. The
section of that report discussing the causes
and effects of a lack of transparency on engi-
neering failures was never published
5
. Fol -
lowing more recent earthquakes in China,
Pakistan and Haiti, we felt it was imperative
to update and air that discussion.
Ground ruLes
The number of deaths continues to climb
despite advances in earthquake-resistant
design in the past century (Fig. 1). Aver-
aged over the past decade, the fatality rate
is 60,000 a year. This average is dominated
by the earthquakes in Indonesia in 2004,
Kashmir in 2005, Iran in 2005, China in
2008 and Haiti in 2010. It includes fatalities
from building collapse and from secondary
causes such as tsunami, landslides and fire.
Since 1980, fatalities from dwelling col-
lapses, for which an absence of earthquake
engineering may be held responsible, aver-
age 18,300 a year.
The recent increase in earthquake fatality
rates might be supposed to arise from
population growth, urbanization or
industrial development. Indeed, when
adjusted for population growth, deaths
from earthquakes are loosely linked with
average global populations (Fig. 1). So has
the application of earthquake-resistant
design and construction of dwellings had
any effect in reducing fatalities from earth-
quakes? Yes: significant nation-to-nation
variations in the cumulative death toll
indicate that the application of resistant
engineering clearly benefits earthquake-
prone countries that have the wealth and
willpower to mandate its use.
Corruption is by nature covert and difficult
to quantify. Yet business people or foreign
visitors are frequently willing to disclose its
presence on the condition of anonymity. The
degree to which corruption is perceived to
exist in different countries has been ranked
annually
8
since 1995 by Transparency Inter-
national, a global civil society organization
headquartered in Berlin, using a Corruption
Perceptions Index (CPI). The score is deter-
mined from an aggregate of 13 polls averaged
over 2 years from 10 institutions alert to the
frequency and extent of bribes paid within
various countries. A CPI score of 0 indicates a
highly corrupt nation with zero transparency;
a score of 10 indicates an absence of perceived
corruption with total transparency. The CPI
is less reliable for countries with fewer sources
of information12. We used an average CPI
derived from our investigation of long-term
fluctuations (Supplementary Fig. 1 — Fig. S1),
and its standard deviation (Fig. S2).
Relative wealth is the most obvious
parameter that influences a country’s cor-
ruption. Wealth is frequently attended by a
stable constitution conducive to the rule of
law. A standard measure that allows compar-
ison of wealth between countries or across
economies is the gross national income
(GNI) per capita. We chose the World Bank’s
GNI Atlas method
9
with data averaged over
the period 1960 to 2009 (Figs S3 and S4).
A clear correlation exists between a nation’s
per capita income and the level of corrup-
tion (Fig. 2). The most corrupt nations are
the poorest (Figs S5 and S6).
For earthquakes of the twentieth century,
particularly the first half, it is not always
possible to confirm published fatality esti-
mates or to calculate new reliable ones. Pre-
vious catalogues characterize uncertainties
in fatality counts by listing estimates from
multiple sources uncritically
13
. The weight-
ing of the most reasonable number from
these is largely subjective4.
We devised a new catalogue by examining
original sources such as government reports
and aid-agency responses. That said, even
for the 2010 Haiti earthquake, reported
fatality estimates vary by a factor of three
from fewer than 85,000 (an investigative
count — probably accurate) to 300,000
(an unsubstantiated guess) (Table S1). Our
catalogue distinguishes deaths caused by the
collapse of dwellings due to ground shak-
ing from the total number of earthquake -
associated deaths, which include those from
secondary effects14 such as aftershocks,
landslides, fire and tsunami.
The number of deaths attributable to
the collapse of dwellings is influenced by
population density and the vulnerability
of building stock in the epicentral region.
In the past 30 years, the rapid increase in
urban populations, particularly in devel-
oping countries, has adversely influenced
building quality. The number of fatalities
depends on whether an earthquake happens
at night or during the day, in the winter or
in the summer, in a mountainous region or
in a valley, after strong and protracted fore-
shocks and with or without warning15. An
earthquake occurring on a winter night is
likely to kill two to five times more people
than one on a summer morning, particu-
larly in a rural region.
GeoLoGY’s accomPLices
We compared earthquake fatalities from
1980 to 2010 with measures of corruption
and wealth. We found, as expected, a direct
relationship between poverty and deaths
20201900 1940 1980
0
20
40
60
80
0
40
80
120
160
Deaths (tens of thousands per decade)
Deaths per million of mean
global decadal population
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Corruption perception index
2 3 4 5 6 1,000 2 3 4 5 6 2 3 4 5
Gross national income per capita (US$)
Haiti
Afghanistan
Papua New Guinea
Yemen
Indonesia
Ecuador
Russia
Iran
Philippines
Algeria
Armenia
India PRC
Mexico
Peru
Turkey
El Salvador
Greece
Italy
Taiwan
Japan
Chile USA
New Zealand
Pakistan
10,000
Figure 2 | Cash and corruption. The poorest countries are the most corrupt, but some are more corrupt
than others. A weighted regression line (dashed) divides nations that are perceived as more corrupt (below
the line) than might be expected from the average income per capita from those that are less corrupt
(above the line). Named countries have lost citizens in building collapse caused by earthquakes since 1980.
Figure 1 | Earthquake deaths. Despite advances
in earthquake engineering, the number of
people killed by earthquakes each decade has
surged (blue), and the number of deaths as a
proportion of global population has not dropped
much (dark grey). Many of these deaths can be
attributed to building collapse (red).
154 | NATURE | VOL 469 | 13 JAN UARY 2011
COMMENT
© 2011 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved
from earthquakes. Clearly, poverty can
lead to the use of unsatisfactory building
materials (such as adobe or poor-quality
concrete), and to a paucity of education,
resulting in ignorance in construction. We
also found that corrupt societies have the
largest death tolls from earthquakes. For
the period 1995 to 2010, when corruption
values can be compared directly with earth-
quake fatalities, we find a quantitative link
between the two (Figs S10 and S11). Because
the corruption index changed only slowly in
this interval (Fig. S1), we assume that CPI
values for 1980–95 are similar to post-1995
data (Fig. S2). This assumption is important,
because deaths caused by building collapse
depend on the corruption prevailing at the
time of construction, not at the time of col-
lapse.
Some countries are less corrupt than
others with equivalent income levels (Fig.
2). We assigned these outliers an ‘expecta-
tion index’, between −2 and +3 CPI units,
with negative values denoting those more
corrupt than might be expected. A three-
dimensional plot (Fig. 3) reveals that about
83% of all deaths from earthquakes in the
past three decades have occurred in poor
countries that are more corrupt than one
might expect from their per capita income.
This striking correlation does not
uniquely distinguish between the relative
contributions of poverty and corruption, but
it suggests that where corruption is extreme,
its effects are manifest in the building indus-
try. The wealthiest of
nations afflicted by
earthquakes can afford
both to educate their
populations and to
purchase good-quality
building materials. So
it seems probable that
large numbers of fatali-
ties from earthquakes
in countries below the
regression line in Fig. 2 can be attributed
largely to the effects of corruption. By
contrast, Chile and New Zealand are less
corrupt than might be expected from their
per capita income, and have low earthquake
fatalities. Japan, with its high per capita
income and low levels of corruption, is an
anomaly that we attribute to the collapse of
older structures in Kobe that predate the
adoption of a code of earthquake-resistant
building.
stark reminder
In sum, there is statistical support for
widespread anecdotal evidence of a corre-
lation between corruption and loss of life
in earthquakes. Haiti and Iran are extreme
examples of nations where fatalities from
earthquakes are excessive and where per-
ceived levels of corruption are above average.
“The global
construction
industry is
the most
corrupt
segment of
the world
economy.”
The statistics also support last year’s widely
voiced opinions that the probability of
earthquake-related deaths is less a function
of geography and more the ability to afford
earthquake-resistant construction and to
enforce building codes.
Sadly, these figures have no predictive
value. Moreover, even if corrupt practices
were eliminated, many present-day impov-
erished nations will have inherited a build-
ing stock that to some degree incorporates
the products of corrupt practices. The
problem of what to do about these existing
poorly built constructions is particularly
difficult, if not economically insoluble.
But our analyses suggest that interna-
tional and national funds set aside for
earthquake resistance in countries where
corruption is endemic are especially prone
to being siphoned off. The structural
integrity of a building is no stronger than
the social integrity of the builder, and each
nation has a responsibility to its citizens to
ensure adequate inspection. In particular,
nations with a history of significant earth-
quakes and known corruption issues should
stand reminded that an unregulated con-
struction industry is a potential killer. ■
Nicholas Ambraseys is in the De partment
of Civil and Environmental Engineering,
Imperial College London, London SW5 2BU,
UK. Roger Bilham i s at the C oope rative
Institute for Research in Environmental
Sciences and the Department of Geological
Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder,
Colorado 80309, USA.
e-mails: rogerbilham@googlemail.com,
n.ambraseys@imperial.ac.uk
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(1970).
Supplementary Information accompanies this
article online at go,nature.com/hvewfl
2
3
2
1
0
–1
10
100
1,000
10,000
100,000
4
Earthquake fatalities
More corrupt–less corrupt
(corruption perception index)
Worse–better
(expectation index)
6
8
Haiti
Pakistan
Indonesia
Mexico
USSR/
Russia
Turkey China
India
Taiwan
Italy
Greece
Japan
Chile
USA
New Zealand
Figure 3 | Corruption’s toll. Corruption versus the level of corruption that might be expected from
per capita income. Of all earthquake fatalities attributable to building collapse in the past three decades,
82.6% occur in societies that are anomalously corrupt (left-hand corner of the plot).
13 JANUARY 2011 | VOL 469 | NATURE | 155
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© 2011 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved
