Corruption is a serious problem worldwide, especially in developing countries. This study investigates the impact of eight forms of government economic intervention on corruption in 157 countries grouped either by per-capita income or by region, for the period 2000 to 2006. The evidence shows that property rights were consistently the most important source of corruption suggesting that anti-corruption efforts should start with reforming the legal system. Corruption was also found associated with government intervention in business and trade and less so in the financial and monetary areas. Government spending and taxation were negatively associated with corruption, implying that what contributes most to corruption is not government size or taxes, but instead regulations and the failure to adequately protect property rights. There appears to be ample room to reduce corruption, especially for developing economies by simplifying and reducing government economic intervention.JEL Classifications: E26, F00, K42

Corruption is a serious international problem with many damaging effects particularly in emerging market countries. We investigated to what degree overregulation and inadequate legal institutions contributed to corruption of small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) in emerging markets. Unlike other studies, we used data from the World Bank's Doing Business annual series which provides indicators of the regulatory and legal environments facing SME. We had three major research questions. (1) Which government obstacles to conducting business in the form of overregulation and inadequate legal institutions contribute most to corruption? (2) Which are more closely linked to corruption, excessive regulations or weak legal institutions? (3) Which of the components, from which the World Bank's indicators are derived, have the largest impact on corruption? We regressed Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index on the nine World Bank indicators and five control variables for 51 emerging market countries from 2007 to 2015. This study concludes that all five regulation indicators, but only one of four legal indicators, contributed to corruption.While past studies have linked regulation and corruption, our contribution was identifying specifically which of the World Bank's measures of the regulatory and legal environment cause corruption. In addition, our results also corroborate those of previous studies regarding our five control variables. Policy wise the World Bank has long advocated reducing regulations to improve SME operating efficiency. Our results further support such a policy because of its important additional benefit of reducing corruption and its many toxic effects. Contribution/ Originality:This study contributes to the existing literature by investigating to what degree overregulation and inadequate legal institutions contributed to corruption of small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) in emerging markets. INTRODUCTIONPublic sector corruption is a serious global problem. This study employs the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) that was developed by Transparency International, a non-governmental organization established and headquartered in Berlin in 1993. As Transparency International (TI) (2011) points out, corruption by its very nature is hidden and relying solely upon actual publicized cases of corruption could greatly understate the degree of corruption. Moreover, countries with the most aggressive and effective anti-corruption policing might mistakenly be perceived as the most corrupt. Consequently, relies upon perceptions data gathered by surveys and expert opinions which it has found were highly correlated with more evidence-based measures.

No abstract

No abstract

Diversifying into commodity futures indices to improve risk-return trade-offs had seemed an inviting prospect a couple of decades ago, due to the increasing correlations between equities themselves and the stable low or negative correlations they exhibited with commodities. But there is a view gaining ground now that the benefits of stock portfolio diversification into commodities have died out due to further changes in the correlation matrices, particularly occurring in times of extreme events. This paper readdresses the aforesaid issue for the period 1999-2010, disaggregated into periods so as to bracket bull and bear phases with large changes in returns. Data for the most important equity and commodity indices are used. One interesting finding is that the role of commodities in optimum portfolio diversification may be more relevant in bear phases.