Monopoly Money: Foreign Investment and Bribery in Vietnam, a Survey Experiment
Abstract
©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.
Type
Journal articleSubject
CorruptionBribery
Rents
Foreign Direct Investment
Multi-National Corporations
World Trade
Organization
Restrictions
List Question
FDI
MNC
UCT
WTO
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/17733Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1111/ajps.12126Publication Info
Malesky, EJ; Gueorguiev, DD; & Jensen, NM (2015). Monopoly Money: Foreign Investment and Bribery in Vietnam, a Survey Experiment. American Journal of Political Science, 59(2). pp. 419-439. 10.1111/ajps.12126. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/17733.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Edmund Malesky
Professor of Political Science
Malesky is a specialist on Southeast Asia, particularly Vietnam. Currently, Malesky's
research agenda is very much at the intersection of Comparative and International
Political Economy, falling into three major categories: 1) Authoritarian political
institutions and their consequences; 2) The political influence of foreign direct
investment and multinational corporations; and 3) Political institutions, private
business development, and formalization.

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