Browsing by Subject "Bribery"

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    Foreign investment and bribery: A firm-level analysis of corruption in Vietnam
    (Journal of Asian Economics, 2012-04) Georguiev, D; Malesky, EJ
    Among the concerns faced by countries pondering the costs and benefits of greater economic openness to international capital flows is the worry that new and powerful external actors will exert a corrupting influence on the domestic economy. In this paper, we use a novel empirical strategy, drawn from research in experimental psychology, to test the linkage between foreign direct investment (FDI) and corruption. The prevailing literature has produced confused and contradictory results on this vital relationship due to errors in their measurement of corruption which are correlated with FDI inflows. When a less biased operationalization is employed, we find clear evidence of corruption during both registration and procurement procedures in Vietnam. The prevalence of corruption, however, is not associated with inflows of FDI. On the contrary, one measure of economic openness appears to be the most important driver of reductions in Vietnamese corruption: the wave of domestic legislation, which accompanied the country's bilateral trade liberalization agreement with the United States (US-BTA), significantly reduced bribery during business registration. © 2011 Elsevier Inc.
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    Monopoly Money: Foreign Investment and Bribery in Vietnam, a Survey Experiment
    (American Journal of Political Science, 2015-02) Malesky, EJ; Gueorguiev, DD; Jensen, NM
    ©2014, Midwest Political Science Association. Prevailing work argues that foreign investment reduces corruption, either by competing down monopoly rents or diffusing best practices of corporate governance. We argue that the mechanisms generating this relationship are not clear because the extant empirical work is too heavily drawn from aggregations of total foreign investment entering an economy. Alternatively, we suggest that openness to foreign investment has differential effects on corruption even within the same country and under the same domestic institutions over time. We argue that foreign firms use bribes to enter protected industries in search of rents, and therefore we expect variation in bribe propensity across sectors according to expected profitability. We test this effect using a list experiment embedded in three waves of a nationally representative survey of 20,000 foreign and domestic businesses in Vietnam, finding that the effect of economic openness on the probability to engage in bribes is conditional on policies that restrict investment.
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    Rent(s) Asunder: Sectoral Rent Extraction Possibilities and Bribery by Multi-National Corporations
    (2011) Gueorguiev, Dimitar D; Malesky, Edmund J; Jensen, Nathan M