Governance and State-Owned Enterprises: How Costly is Corruption?

By Anja Baum, Clay Hackney, Paulo A Medas, Mouhamadou Sy

November 22, 2019

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Anja Baum, Clay Hackney, Paulo A Medas, and Mouhamadou Sy. Governance and State-Owned Enterprises: How Costly is Corruption?, (USA: International Monetary Fund, 2019) accessed September 20, 2024

Disclaimer: IMF Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to encourage debate. The views expressed in IMF Working Papers are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of the IMF, its Executive Board, or IMF management.

Summary

State-owned enterprises (SOEs) are present in key sectors of the economies around the world. While they can provide an important public service, there is widespread concern that their activities are negatively affected by corruption. However, there is limited cross-country analysis on the costs of corruption for SOEs. We present new evidence on how corruption affects the performance of SOEs using firm level data across a large number of countries. One striking result is that SOEs perform as well as private firms in core sectors when corruption is low. Taking advantage of a novel database reforms, we also show that SOE governance reforms can generate significant performance gains.

Subject: Commodities, Corruption, Crime, Economic sectors, Electricity, Expenditure, Labor, Labor costs, Public enterprises, Public expenditure review

Keywords: Construction firm, Corruption, Current ratio, Electricity, Firm-level indicators, Global, Governance reform, Labor costs, Operating profit, Private firm, Public enterprises, Public expenditure review, SOE conditionality, SOE performance, SOE reform, Solid windowtext, WP

Publication Details

Pages:

43
Volume:

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DOI:

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Issue:

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Series:

Working Paper No. 2019/253
Stock No:

WPIEA2019253
ISBN:

9781513519296
ISSN:

1018-5941

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