Recent years have seen a growing demand for more robust measurement of corruption from international investors, politicians, citizens, and international organizations. We found that when the SECPI is at least one standard deviation above the mean, the growth per capita falls by 0.65 percentage point on average, with more pronounced impacts for emerging market and low income countries.Ĭorruption is difficult to measure directly, and measuring the perceptions of corruption via survey-based methods is often used as an alternative. Increases in the perceived incidence or scope of corruption influences economic agents’ behaviors, and thus economic dynamics. The SECPI is negatively correlated with business environment and institutional quality. This index, while correlated with existing corruption perception indexes, offers some distinct advantages, including heightened sensitivity to current events (e.g., corruption investigations and elections), availability at a higher frequency, and lower costs to update. This sentiment-enhanced corruption perception index (SECPI) captures not only the frequncy of corruption related articles, but also the articles’ sentiment towards corruption. This paper constructs a new non-survey based perceptions index for 111 countries by applying sentiment analysis to Financial Times articles over 2005–18. Direct measurement of corruption is difficult due to its hidden nature, and measuring the perceptions of corruption via survey-based methods is often used as an alternative.