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Until recently, studies have not reached any general agreement on how a corrupt environment influences foreign investments. Furthermore, far too little attention has so far been paid to how corruption relates to the performance of foreign and domestically owned firms. This paper exploits cross-sectional firm-level data from the fifth round of the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS V) for the purpose of investigating how bribery is associated with FDI and firm performance. By using various econometric estimation strategies, we find that foreign owned firms tend to pay larger bribes compared to domestically owned firms, while the negative size of these expenses on firm productivity is larger for foreign owned firms than domestically owned firms in highly corrupt countries. This study suggests that developing countries should fight against informal payments in bureaucracy to create corruption free environments, so that multinationals are incentivized to invest in their countries.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to examine the link between behavioural and personality traits of firm representatives and bribery in the case study of Vietnam; second, to study whether corruption is associated to firm performance through managers’ personality traits. Design/methodology/approach This study uses novel data from micro, small and medium firms in Vietnam for investigating the relationship between behavioural and personality traits of representatives of firms and bribery. Stratified sampling method is employed to ensure an adequate number of firms in each province with different ownership types. Ordinary least squares and logistic estimation techniques are used in this analysis. Findings This paper finds that traits of risk loving and innovativeness are positively associated to the likelihood of paying bribe whereas managers’ internal locus of control is negatively related to the probability of paying bribe. This paper reveals that managers, who have risk loving characteristics and get engaged to bribe payments, are related to lower firm performances. Research limitations/implications Despite the fact that this paper provides robust and statistically significant empirical analysis, results from this paper are constrained with use of cross-sectional survey data, which has been conducted in 2015. Although this paper can provide strong correlations, it does not establish causal linkages and one should therefore be careful in interpreting the observed patterns as causal impacts. Originality/value The role of managerial personality traits in corruption interactions has not yet been explicitly proposed and empirically investigated. This paper attempts to fill this void by examining the relationship between managerial traits and corruption tendencies among SMEs in Vietnam.

The paper focuses on examining the role of blue industries in the national economies of Estonia and Finland as two neighbouring countries that have a sea border. We exploit the Input-Output (I-O) methodology to analyse inter-industry linkages relying on the OECD I-O tables. The OECD database comprises information on 34 sectors of the national economy over the period 1995-2011. The results of the analysis show that despite rather weak overall backward and forward linkages of aggregated blue industries within the national economies, they play a remarkable role in the economic activities of maritime regions, and to a large extent drive the economic success of Estonian and Finnish regional and national economies in generating new growth and employment. The weak backward and forward linkages indicate that negative dynamics within the blue economy yield rather weak negative externalities for the overall economy, and by contrast, if the national economy as a whole is suffering under a crisis, the potential impact on industries is not particularly remarkable. These findings suggest that blue industries are relatively independent within national economies having a remarkable role in socio-economic development of maritime regions, and thereby, create good preconditions for the stable development of cross-border cooperation between the maritime regions of both countries.

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