The European Union is interested in ensuring that each national administration offers comparable administrative capacity through quality of public services and professionalism from the civil servants. At the same time, the European states are characterised by long and varied institutional...

This paper examines the impact of corruption on foreign direct investment inflows for ten Central and Eastern European states. The paper attempts to answer the question: what is the role of corruption in attracting foreign direct investments? Using the data from UNCTAD for foreign direct...

Reducing corruption is one of the world’s many challenges. The fight against corruption is often discouraging. Yet, Europe continues to advance its anti-corruption initiatives. While the fight against has seen some victories, significant gains are few, especially in the Central and South...

Fighting public-sector corruption has become a priority for most governments and international organizations. The public sector is the source of many benefits. Realizing improper private gains from these benefits has long been the core definition of corruption. As the public sector grows and...

Corruption stands as one of the many obstacles to the political and economic security of the Eastern European region. Thus, despite the political and economic instability in the region, Eastern European countries, in and outside of the European Union need to fight corruption collectively and...

This paper focuses on the analysis of the long-run response of the Real Exchange Rate (RER) to political risks and tests whether non-economic variables have an impact on RER in 31 emerging and developing countries. We use annual data from the International Country Risk Guide database over the...

The word “scapegoat” is defined as “a person made to bear the blame for others,” and similarly, “scapegoatism” refers to “the act or practice of assigning blame or failure to another, as to deflect attention or responsibility away from oneself” (Collins English Dictionary and...

Chinese aid comes with few strings attached, allowing recipient country leaders to use it for domestic political purposes. The vulnerability of Chinese aid to political capture has prompted speculation that it may be economically ineffective, or even harmful. We test these claims by estimating...

A stream of research examining the effect of punishment on conformity indicates that punishment can backfire and lead to suboptimal social outcomes. In such studies, the enforcement of a behavioral rule to cooperate originates from a single party. This feature may raise concern about the...

We investigate the effects of an institutional mechanism that incentivizes taxpayers to blow the whistle on collusive corruption and tax compliance. We explore this through a formal leniency program. In our experiment, we nest collusive corruption within a tax evasion framework. We not only...