This research assesses perception of corruption in business-to-business and business-to-government interactions by using empirical evidence from Serbia. Based on the survey data, it captures the perceptions of corruption of business owners and managers of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and examines their attitudes towards informal, licit, or illicit, business practices. The typology of SMEs according to their opinion on corruption- and institutional-related obstacles resulted in three different clusters, based on several variables. Moreover, empirical findings show that business is not much hindered by regulations but with a common lack of trust in institutions, crime, and perceived corruption. SMEs are perceived as particularly affected by a negative corrupt environment where large companies are seen as the source of corruption. The findings allow for the creation of lawful and incorruptible business policies, as well as ideas on preventing the common practice of illicit trading with job positions in the public sector.

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This conference report combines the latest theoretical developments within the areas of corruption and informality research in Southeastern Europe from the eighteenth until the twenty-first century with a presentation of the ongoing research conducted by the Regensburg Corruption Cluster and the inputs of some of the leading experts within these fields. The authors outline a practical interdisciplinary framework for developing a historical anthropology of corruption, by integrating knowledge and methods from various disciplines, such as history, linguistics and business studies. In doing so, they show how the ideological–normativistic approaches of the so-called “anticorruption consensus” can be overcome: by lowering the analytical scale to the level of informal practices and following their evolution through historical circumstances. This report also shows the persistent difficulties in establishing “ethical universalism” in Southeastern Europe with examples ranging from eighteenth-century Phanariot rule in Wallachia to twenty-first-century corruption scandals in Serbia and Croatia.