Ukraine had had its ups and downs in recent years. It has, for example, dramatically improved its ease of doing business (EOBB), and it has made some progress reducing the relative size and influence of its shadow economy (Shadow). But, the Russian invasion of 2014 (Conflict) forced it to take a...

We study the effects of “corruption distance,” defined as the difference in corruption levels between country pairs, on bilateral foreign direct investment (FDI). Using a “gravity” model and the Heckman (1979) two-stage framework on a data set of 45 countries from 1997 to 2007, we find...

Economic growth is below what would be needed to resume rapid convergence to average OECD living standards. On-going efforts to improve the business climate are laudable, but need to be widened and strengthened. Much progress has been achieved in reducing red tape, but it is only recently that...

India embarked on a path of liberal economic reform in the 1990s after years of nurturing an intensively regulated and controlled economic environment that was loosened slightly in the mid-1980s. The most important and critical segments of this reform were trade and foreign investment. India has...

This paper empirically examines the impact of corruption on FDI in European Union countries, including candidate countries. Our aim is to verify whether Efficient Grease Hypothesis does hold in the case of the EU. Contrary to the Hypothesis, we find that corruption has a negative impact on FDI....

This paper analyzes the causes of corruption in contemporary Bolivia. It argues that, along with the well-documented observation that richer countries tend, on average, to be less corrupt than poorer ones, corruption is directly dependent on FDI inflows, with higher levels of FDI associated with...

We develop a formal model that looks at the mutually endogenous determination of foreign direct investments in natural resource-rich countries, the decision of host governments to expropriate these investments, and the level of corruption. Higher resource production makes expropriation more...