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According to conventional wisdom, rising corruption reduces economic growth. And yet, between 1978 and 2010, even as officials were looting state coffers, extorting bribes, raking in kickbacks, and scraping off rents at unprecedented rates, the Chinese economy grew at an average annual rate of 9 percent. InDouble Paradox, Andrew Wedeman seeks to explain why the Chinese economy performed so well despite widespread corruption at almost kleptocratic levels. Wedeman finds that the Chinese economy was able to survive predatory corruption because corruption did not explode until after economic reforms had unleashed dynamic growth. To a considerable extent corruption was also a by-product of the transfer of undervalued assets from the state to the emerging private and corporate sectors and a scramble to capture the windfall profits created by their transfer. Perhaps most critically, an anticorruption campaign, however flawed, has proved sufficient to prevent corruption from spiraling out of control. Drawing on more than three decades of data from China-as well as examples of the interplay between corruption and growth in South Korea, Taiwan, Equatorial Guinea, and other nations in Africa and the Caribbean-Wedeman cautions that rapid growth requires not only ongoing and improved anticorruption efforts but also consolidated and strengthened property rights.

The primary objective of this paper is to assess whether Namibia is ready to become an oil producer. The geological estimates suggest that the country may possess the equivalent of as many as 11 billion barrels of crude oil. If the numbers are correct, Namibia would be sitting on the second-largest oil reserves in sub-Saharan Africa, and exploitation could start as soon as 2017. This clearly raises the question of whether Namibia is next in line to become a victim of the notorious \"resource curse.\" On the basis of critical discourse analysis and findings from field research, the authors have selected six dimensions of the resource curse and contextualised them within the spheres of Namibian politics and economy. While Namibia still faces a number of important challenges, our findings offer little evidence that the oil will have particularly disruptive effects. Die Autoren des Beitrags versuchen einzuschätzen, unter welchen Voraussetzungen Namibia in die Erdölförderung einsteigt. Nach geologischen Schätzungen könnte das Land über 11 Milliarden Barrel Rohöl verfügen. Wenn sich die Zahlen als richtig erweisen, besitzt Namibia die zweitgrößten Erdölreserven Subsahara-Afrikas; die Förderung könnte schon im Jahr 2017 beginnen. Damit ergibt sich die Frage, ob Namibia der nächste Staat ist, der dem „Ressourcenfluch“ zum Opfer fällt. Auf der Grundlage einer kritischen Diskursanalyse und unter Berücksichtigung von Feldforschungsergebnissen haben die Autoren politische und ökonomische Merkmale des namibischen Staates entlang von sechs Dimensionen des Ressourcenfluch-Ansatzes untersucht. Ihrer Einschätzung nach steht Namibia zwar vor erheblichen Herausforderungen, sie sehen aber nur wenige Hinweise darauf, dass die Erdölförderung sich besonders negativ auf die politische und soziale Entwicklung des Landes auswirken wird.

Although corruption has attracted researchers' attention for more than 30 years, it remains one of the most significant political challenges all countries face. Even though corruption measures have improved, they lack reliability and clarity. Two aspects of corruption are examined in this paper: a) its measurement and b) its effects on the economic performance of 83 developing countries in the period 2012-2018 with AR (1) and FM-OLS data processing techniques. It provides an extensive reference for and critical assessment of different corruption index approaches, focusing on the already known and widespread indicators. Furthermore, it refers to the measures most suited for statistical analyses regarding perceptions and experiences. In addition, the study's empirical results show that corruption hinders the economic growth of those developing countries. Different levels of corruption impact economic growth in different regions; specifically in Latin American countries, corruption impacts positively on economic growth or vice versa; in the other regions, it is negative. Finally, investment, human development, government growth, and institutional quality play essential roles in economic growth.

This paper studies the effect of additional government revenues on political corruption and on the quality of politicians, both with theory and data. The theory is based on a political agency model with career concerns and endogenous entry of candidates. The data refer to Brazil, where federal transfers to municipal governments change exogenously at given population thresholds, allowing us to implement a regression discontinuity design. The empirical evidence shows that larger transfers increase observed corruption and reduce the average education of candidates for mayor. These and other more specific empirical results are in line with the predictions of the theory.

Are natural resources a \"curse\" or a \"blessing\"? The empirical evidence suggests that either outcome is possible. This paper surveys a variety of hypotheses and supporting evidence for why some countries benefit and others lose from the presence of natural resources. These include that a resource bonanza induces appreciation of the real exchange rate, deindustrialization, and bad growth prospects, and that these adverse effects are more severe in volatile countries with bad institutions and lack of rule of law, corruption, presidential democracies, and underdeveloped financial systems. Another hypothesis is that a resource boom reinforces rent grabbing and civil conflict especially if institutions are bad, induces corruption especially in nondemocratic countries, and keeps in place bad policies. Finally, resource rich developing economies seem unable to successfully convert their depleting exhaustible resources into other productive assets. The survey also offers some welfare-based fiscal rules for harnessing resource windfalls in developed and developing economies.

Recent years have seen a remarkable expansion in economists' ability to measure corruption. This in turn has led to a new generation of well-identified, microeconomic studies. We review the evidence on corruption in developing countries in light of these recent advances, focusing on three questions: how much corruption is there, what are the efficiency consequences of corruption, and what determines the level of corruption? We find robust evidence that corruption responds to standard economic incentive theory but also that the effects of anticorruption policies often attenuate as officials find alternate strategies to pursue rents.

We examine the responses of South African multinational enterprises (MNEs) to corruption in African markets in the context of institutional voids. Corruption is a source of uncertainty and additional transactional costs for MNEs and it necessitates a strategic response. The research employs a qualitative study of a sample of MNEs with experience in internationalising into Africa. The results indicate that corruption in African markets is pervasive and closely associated with the institutional voids in these countries. MNEs see themselves as 'institution takers' responding to countries' institutional makeup at the organisational and individual level but fail to fully appreciate their impact on institutions both positively and negatively. Rather MNEs focus on strategic responses at the organisational level to address corruption operationally in the host country. We add to the existing literature by providing a dynamic framework of the complex webs of association between institutions, MNEs and corruption in conditions of economic underdevelopment. The research suggests that MNEs do not need to get caught in a vicious cycle whereby they perpetuate corruption in conditions of underdevelopment and institutional voids but instead can contribute towards a virtuous cycle through which they institutionalise ethical foundations.

This paper will discuss eight frequently asked questions about public corruption: (1) What is corruption? (2) Which countries are the most corrupt? (3) What are the common characteristics of countries with high corruption? (4) What is the magnitude of corruption? (5) Do higher wages for bureaucrats reduce corruption? (6) Can competition reduce corruption?( 7) Why have there been so few (recent) successful attempts to fight corruption? (8) Does corruption adversely affect growth?

Many scholarly articles on corruption give the impression that the world is populated by two types of people: the ‘sanders’ and the ‘greasers’. The ‘sanders’ believe that corruption is an obstacle to development, while the ‘greasers’ believe that corruption can (in some cases) foster development. This paper takes a critical look at these positions. It concludes that the evidence supporting the ‘greasing the wheels hypothesis’ is very weak and shows that there is no correlation between a new measure of managers’ actual experience with corruption and GDP growth. Instead, the paper uncovers a strong negative correlation between growth in genuine wealth per capita—a direct measure of sustainable development—and corruption. While corruption may have little average effect on the growth rate of GDP per capita, it is a likely source of unsustainable development.

China is currently undergoing an important stage wherein it is adjusting its development mode and upgrading its industrial structure. Green investment has become a major driving force through which China can achieve green and sustainable development. Based on the panel data of 30 Chinese provinces for the 2006–2017 period, this paper uses a spatial Durbin model and a dynamic threshold model to empirically analyze the impact of green investment and institutional quality on environmental pollution. The research results show that China’s environmental pollution is significantly characterized by spatial dependence. Local environmental pollution is negatively impacted by green investment, but it is not affected by green investment in neighboring areas; this conclusion remains valid after a series of robustness tests. Green investment can reduce environmental pollution by improving efficiency of energy conservation and emission reduction, expanding technological innovation capabilities and upgrading the industrial structure. The regression results of the dynamic threshold model show that green investment has a nonlinear impact on environmental pollution that is dependent on institutional quality. A higher degree of regional corruption can lead to a gradual decrease in the role of green investment in reducing environmental pollution. However, improvements in marketization and intellectual property protection can increase the positive influence of green investment in reducing environmental pollution. Significant regional heterogeneity is also found in the impact of green investment on environmental pollution, and this impact gradually decreases from the eastern coast to the western region.