TY - JOUR
T1 - Does Corruption Discourage Entrepreneurship?*
AU - Park, Donghyun
AU - Shin, Kwanho
N1 - Funding Information:
* This paper was prepared as background material for the Asian Development Outlook 2022 theme chapter “Entrepreneurship in the Digital Age” and published as Asian Development Bank work-ing paper no. 670. We would like to thank Hyein Han for excellent research assistance, participants of the theme chapter workshop in April 2022 for comments, and the Asian Development Bank for financial support.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 by the Asian Economic Panel and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
PY - 2022/9/1
Y1 - 2022/9/1
N2 - Although entrepreneurship plays a key role in economic development, its precise effect remains largely unknown. This is because it is challenging to objectively measure entrepreneurship and identify its determinants. In this paper, we analyze the effect of a particular feature of the institutional landscape, namely, corruption, on entrepreneurship. It is expected that corruption discourages entrepreneurship because it undermines fair competition. We use two proxies for entrepreneurship that are widely used in the literature: (1) nascent entrepreneurship collected from Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, and (2) entry rate defined as the number of new firms divided by the total number of previous year’s registered businesses, collected from World Bank Group Entrepreneurship Survey. We find that better control of corruption promotes entrepreneurship. Our evidence is stronger when we use entry rate as a proxy of entrepreneurship. Our findings are preserved when we add other determinants of entrepreneurship drawn from the literature. When we use legal origins as instruments for corruption, our results remain essentially the same. The size of population, a proxy for market size, is positively associated with entrepreneurship while corporate taxes are negatively associated.
AB - Although entrepreneurship plays a key role in economic development, its precise effect remains largely unknown. This is because it is challenging to objectively measure entrepreneurship and identify its determinants. In this paper, we analyze the effect of a particular feature of the institutional landscape, namely, corruption, on entrepreneurship. It is expected that corruption discourages entrepreneurship because it undermines fair competition. We use two proxies for entrepreneurship that are widely used in the literature: (1) nascent entrepreneurship collected from Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, and (2) entry rate defined as the number of new firms divided by the total number of previous year’s registered businesses, collected from World Bank Group Entrepreneurship Survey. We find that better control of corruption promotes entrepreneurship. Our evidence is stronger when we use entry rate as a proxy of entrepreneurship. Our findings are preserved when we add other determinants of entrepreneurship drawn from the literature. When we use legal origins as instruments for corruption, our results remain essentially the same. The size of population, a proxy for market size, is positively associated with entrepreneurship while corporate taxes are negatively associated.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85139528129&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1162/asep_a_00855
DO - 10.1162/asep_a_00855
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85139528129
SN - 1535-3516
VL - 21
SP - 40
EP - 59
JO - Asian Economic Papers
JF - Asian Economic Papers
IS - 3
ER -
