This study offers fresh insights on and investigates the effects of corruption on foreign direct investment (FDI) inflow from 1995 to 2009 in 16 Asian economies. The empirical result suggests that a 1 percent increase in corruption level triggers an approximately 9.1 percentage point decrease in...

Fiscal decentralization has been a fundamental aspect of China's transition to a market economy; and the country has made substantial efforts to break down its highly centralized fiscal management system with various forms of fiscal contracting systems (1978-1993) and later a tax sharing system...

This paper sheds light on the heavy financial burden on peasants in China's fiscal decentralization system. Using a political economy framework, this paper explores the tax-farming nature of China's fiscally decentralized system and examines why the system incurs a particularly heavy financial...

Understanding the logic of fiscal decentralization is pivotal to the next steps of fiscal reform. The first step is a retrospection of the literature and evidence accumulated in the field. As a typical transition economy with rapid and extensive devolution reforms, China is the ideal context to...

This paper, a synthesis of salient findings of the authors’ book entitled “Investment Climate Around the World: Voices of the Firms from the World Business Environment Survey”, and based on a chapter in “Pathways Out of Poverty: Private Firms and Economic Mobility in Developing...

The present paper is part of unpublished book divided into three interrelated manuscripts that analyze the collapse of the Sudan. The theory introduced here is that the regime was built on kleptocratic framework. That enhanced a rapid transformation of the values' system of the country and...

A growing body of evidence documents numerous and deleterious economic and social consequences of corruption. These findings beg the question: How to reduce corruption? We exploit exogenous sources of variation in latitude, ethno linguistic fractionalization, settler mortality rates, legal...

In this contribution to a symposium sponsored by the Michigan State University Journal of International Law, the author argues that predominantly evolutionary Soviet transition to the Rule of Law (initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev's ‘Perestroika' at the end of the 1980s) was derailed by...

This paper clarifies one of the puzzling results of the economic growth literature: The impact of military expenditure is frequently found to be non-significant or negative, yet most countries spend a large fraction of their GDP on defense and the military. We start by empirical evaluation of...

Existing research has found that economic growth is higher in countries where (1) certain religious beliefs are stronger and (2) the rule of law is stronger and corruption is lower. This paper examines whether religion is correlated with the rule of law and the level of corruption, thereby...