Ganxi's Consequences: Personal Gains at Social Cost

Is guanxi ethical? This question is largely ignored in the existing literature. This paper examines the ethical dimension of guanxi by focusing on the consequences of guanxi in business, from ethically misgiving behaviour to outright corruption. Guanxi may bring benefits to individuals as well as the organisations they represent but these benefits are obtained at the expenses of other individuals or firms and thus detrimental to the society. As guanxi has an impact on the wider public other than the guanxi parties, it must be studied in the context of all stakeholders. It can be argued that guanxi is an inevitable evil under the current political and socio-economic systems in China. Its role and importance in business life will be diminished as the country moves towards an open market system.     

The United Nations Convention Against Corruption and its Impact on International Companies

Corruption is a serious economic, social, political, and moral blight, especially in many emerging countries. It is a problem that affects companies in particular, especially in international commerce, finance, and technology transfer. And it is becoming an international phenomenon in scope, substance, and consequences. That is why, in recent years, there has been a proliferation of international efforts to tackle the problem of corruption. One such international cooperative initiative is the United Nations Convention against Corruption, signed in 2003, which came into force in December 2005. This is the first truly global instrument to prevent and combat corruption, built on a broad international consensus. The purpose of this article is to explain the origin and content of the Convention, what it adds to existing international instruments for combating corruption, and its strengths and weaknesses, mainly from the point of view of companies.     

基于委托-代理模型的腐败行为分析

与经济活动中的委托-代理关系一样,在公共事务中也客观存在着委托-代理关系,由于激励不相容、信息不对称、监督乏力等弊病,及代理人追求自身利益的最大化,导致了公共权力委托-代理的失灵,引发政府官员的腐败。     

Health insurance subsidies and the expansion of an implicit marriage penalty: a regional comparison of various means-tested programmes

Any subsidy provision for healthcare premiums, including those embedded in Affordable Care Act (ACA), has the potential to result in some couples facing an implicit penalty when married relative to unmarried. To illustrate such consequences of means-tested subsidies of health insurance premiums, we construct hypothetical households earning different levels of income who are eligible for current subsidies in the USA. and compare the estimated implicit marriage penalty faced by these households to the one faced by low-income households who are eligible for various means-tested programmes (e.g. TANF, WIC, SNAP) for each of the 48 contiguous states. We find that, like very low-income households, marriage can potentially penalize couples who receive health insurance premium subsidies by decreasing their overall disposable income by as much as 14%. We find that the ACA increases the number of households subject to marriage penalties embedded in means-tested programmes for low-income couples. This distortion will exist for any future health insurance premium subsidies that are means tested at the household income level.     

Privatisation and corruption in historical perspective: The case of secularisation in Bavaria and Prussia in the early nineteenth century

Abstract

The article deals with privatisation and the valuation of such processes in Germany around 1800. Therefore, it focuses on a topic that has rarely been studied by historians for any time period, although the phenomenon was widespread in the past. The author argues that secularisation in 1803–1810 can be seen as an important privatisation process, because it included large transfers of former church property into private hands. Furthermore, he shows that a new generation of officials benefited from this process, although they had denounced comparable practices as corruption in the previous decades. They could easily justify such advantageous transfers publicly with their self-perception as an administrative and entrepreneurial elite. However, contemporaries publicly accused their actions and the secularisation itself of being corrupt. The author shows that privatisation was already a publicly discussed issue in the nineteenth century and needed to be justified. A history of privatisation, as the author finally states, allows insights into contemporaneous concepts of markets, state and welfare, and their effect in the respective time period.     

Cleaning San Francisco,cleaning the United States: The graft prosecutions of 1906–1909 and their nationwide consequences

Abstract

This case study examines public debates on, and investigations of, corrupt city officials and bribe-giving businesspeople in the western metropolis of San Francisco during the era of progressivism. Law enforcement was not only difficult because of the lack of juridical evidence but also because large portions of the local business elites were benefiting from illicit structures. The prosecutions failed, but financier, banker and capitalist Rudolph Spreckels initiated a national anti-graft movement in the early 1910s, which discussed the concept of corporate social and civic responsibility as an alternative to criminal prosecution and an opportunity to harmonise class conflicts.     

The effect of corruption on microfinance loan portfolio: A semiparametric analysis

In this paper, we examine the extent to which corruption affects the loan portfolio of microfinance institutions (MFIs). We employ robust econometric estimation on a sample of 507 MFIs across 63 countries from 2005 to 2018. Our results show that corruption is negatively associated with the loan portfolio. However, in semiparametric analysis, we find that lower-level corruption is beneficial to increase the loan portfolio while higher-level corruption is detrimental. The results imply that it is not just corruption that matters as far as its effect on MFIs' loan portfolio is concerned; what matters is the degree of corruption. In further analyses, we find that corruption reduces both the number of active borrowers and average loan per borrower indicating that corruption reduces both coverage and amount of credit extension. The results suggest that the effect of corruption on the loan portfolio is gender-sensitive. Corruption facilitates an increase in loans to female borrowers. Our results are robust to alternative variable measurements and different identification strategies, including two-stage least square.     

债务限额、税收自主权与地方政府隐性债务风险*

债务限额管理对隐性债务风险的影响是目前相关研究中的薄弱环节。本文基于全国30个省份2010—2018年的面板数据，运用广义双重差分模型进行了实证研究。研究发现，债务限额没有起到约束隐性债务增长的作用，且债务限额空间减少会加剧隐性债务风险扩张。这一效应在中西部地区尤为明显，而提高税收自主权会减弱债务限额的不利影响。以地方官员集体决策制度（省级党委常委会）衡量的地区异质性分析发现，债务限额对地方隐性债务风险的不利影响在中央下派常委比例高的地区更小。进一步对债务限额进行细分研究发现，地方债置换和新增债券发行对隐性债务风险有不同影响。本文的政策含义是治理地方隐性债务风险需要将债务限额制度、官员行为、财税体制改革结合起来，标本兼治，才能真正实现隐性债务风险化解目标。     

Letting third parties who suffer from petty corruption talk: Evidence from a collusive bribery experiment

Following a recommendation by Transparency International, we conduct a laboratory experiment to gauge the impact of a specific type of grassroots participation on petty corruption. Participants play a one-shot, three-person sequential bribery game that, depending on the treatment, either gives or does not give passive third parties suffering from corruption the opportunity to send a publicly visible message to potential bribers and bribees. We find that messaging opportunities deter bribe offers (i.e., the extensive margin of bribe), but affect neither the size of the offered bribe (i.e., the intensive margin) nor bribe acceptances. We conjecture that the different impact of the treatment on bribe-givers and bribe-takers may be due to the order of play.     

The nexus between public sector corruption and private sector efficiency: Evidence from worldwide firm-level data

Anti-corruption is highlighted as one of the key institutional principles by the United Nations, as corruption hinders the progress in achieving sustainable development goals. However, the extant literature on how private firms' efficiency is influenced by corruption prevailing in regulatory agencies across economies has been inconclusive. Analyzing the World Bank Enterprise Survey data across 45,121 firms from 80 countries, this study finds that bribe payments to corrupt public officials by firms causes bureaucratic delays. Employing an instrumental variable Tobit framework to address the issue of endogeneity inherited with observational data, this study demonstrates that an increase in the magnitude of bribes and depth of corruption by one percentage point separately expands the firm managers' time being spent on regulatory requirements by 2.78 percentage points and 2.47 percentage points, respectively. The findings are robust to different specifications. The results imply the importance of promoting anti-corruption measures across countries to create a conducive environment for firms to enhance efficiency, and thereby to achieve sustainable development goals successfully.