  In order to investigate whether government regulations against corruption can
affect the economic growth of a country, we analyze the dependence between
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita growth rates and changes in the
Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). For the period 1999-2004 on average for all
countries in the world, we find that an increase of CPI by one unit leads to an
increase of the annual GDP per capita by 1.7 %. By regressing only European
transition countries, we find that $\Delta$CPI = 1 generates increase of the
annual GDP per capita by 2.4 %. We also analyze the relation between foreign
direct investments received by different countries and CPI, and we find a
statistically significant power-law functional dependence between foreign
direct investment per capita and the country corruption level measured by the
CPI. We introduce a new measure to quantify the relative corruption between
countries based on their respective wealth as measured by GDP per capita.
