I'd say it does. During a modeling project I worked on back when I was in school, my team found that beyond any other social or economic factor the value of the corruption index was the best correlated to how f'd up a country was. The next best was, I think, women's literacy or some other equality measure.

What was surprising to me was how uncorrelated other factors of economic health were. We found examples of countries with pretty poor indicators but very low corruption, and they had a lot of opportunity, future, and growth.