Narrow Results

The current evidence-base regarding the impacts of corruption on firm performance is based largely on studies of individual countries and contains mixed results. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to achieve a better insight into this relationship by reporting the results of a firm-level analysis of the impacts of corruption on firm performance using World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES) data across 40 African countries. The clear result is that corruption significantly enhances rather than harms annual sales, employment and productivity growth rates. The outcome is to re-theorize participation in acts of corruption as beneficial for the individual firms engaged in such activity, while recognizing the wider evidence that this is not an optimal strategy at the aggregate country level. The outcome will be to advance knowledge about how corruption needs to be tackled. To eliminate corruption, it is shown here to be necessary for public authorities to recognize that corruption is an efficient strategy at the firm level and to adopt measures to alter the cost/benefit ratio confronting individual enterprises, and at the same time, to address the country-level formal institutional deficiencies that characterize many developing countries and result in the prevalence of corruption.

This paper explores how corruption indirectly affects economic growth through business regulation in Latin America and the Caribbean, a relationship that has scarcely been addressed in the literature. Although regulation of the private sector explains GDP per capita, the effect is conditioned by the level of corruption. When the control of corruption is greater, there is an increase in the extent to which bureaucracy when starting a business and trading across borders negatively affects GDP per capita in Latin America and the Caribbean. This finding corroborates the “greasing the wheels” hypothesis.

Discussions on entrepreneurial ecosystems have been a relatively recent addition to the corpus of entrepreneurship literature and have focused heavily on fostering aggressive growth, often technology-based, ventures. Here, we tune the ecosystem model to fit the non-technologically innovative entrepreneurial spaces of emerging economies. We propose a new framework for viewing the cultural effect on entrepreneurship through interactions between the individual entrepreneur’s identity, and networks within specific infrastructural and institutional regimes wrought by predominant culture. In applying the model to mid-twentieth century Bangladesh, we find a culturally predominant negative perception of entrepreneurial activity. We show this contributed to the growth of certain types of entrepreneurship in the country that were rife with (i) higher risk-tolerant behavior among entrepreneurs and (ii) the rise of entrepreneurs having strong links with specific social networks, which together led to an increase in institutional decay and the rise of corruption.

This conceptual paper contributes to the study of moral and immoral organizational development by combining two different perspectives: organizational learning (OL) and the worldview of Islam. The OL perspective, particularly Crossan, Lane and White’s (1999) 4I OL framework, outlines four sub-learning processes involved in strategic renewal spanning the individual, group and organizational levels. Then, the framework is recast in the light of the worldview of Islam, particularly on the natural connection between learning and moral development. From an Islamic perspective, knowledge is soteriological and plays a crucial role in the ‘purification of the heart’, i.e. individual moral development. However, corruption of knowledge can also occur, which then leads to corruption of the ‘heart’, i.e. individual immoral development. This then has profound implications for the 4I OL framework. As a result, a reconceptualized framework is conceived called ‘OL by hearts’, which outlines the strategic moral & immoral development of individuals, groups and the organization.