Let me suggest something a bit more nuanced.

Each society has certain cultural and constitutional traits or predispositions that make it more or less susceptible to corruption and to economic development. Differences between such societies may initially be fairly subtle, tho.

We can then get a situation of chaotic response, or hypersensitivity to initial conditions. If something (internal or external) starts that society down a path toward either corruption or economic stagnation, it may fight it off and re-stabilize itself. If it can’t, it enters a situation of positive feedback between increasing corruption and increasing impoverishment, each feeding off and increasing the other. The result is a Mexico or maybe Zimbabwe, where both corruption and poverty are endemic and mutually supportive.

Lots of examples of the destructive side, not so many obvious ones of the other– maybe in part my ignorance, and in part that such societies nip those things in the bud before they enter the non-specialist history books.