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The purpose of this research is to evaluate corruption in the context of India, spanning the period between 1988 and 2021. Additionally, it aims to provide an in-depth comprehension of the factors that drive its prevalence and to propose policy directives for addressing these underlying issues.

The study instead of relying on perception-based measures, takes a distinct approach by formulating a corruption index derived from reported instances, thus ensuring a more objective assessment. Furthermore, we employ stochastic frontier analysis to tackle the issue of under-reporting within the corruption index based on reported cases. Subsequently, an auto regressive distributed lag (ARDL) methodology is applied to ascertain the principal drivers of corruption, encompassing both long and short factors.

This study reveals that corruption in India is notably influenced by economic growth and income inequality. Conversely, government effectiveness and globalization display a tendency to mitigate corruption. However, our rigorous analysis demonstrates that financial development does not wield a substantial influence in our study. Moreover, our inquiry uncovers a nonlinear relationship between economic growth and corruption. Additionally, we ascertain that the long run and short run impacts of corruption remain relatively stable across both models utilized in our study.

This study differs from previous research in the subsequent manners. Primarily, we employed an objective measure to formulate the corruption index, coupled with addressing the underreporting issues via stochastic frontier analysis. Moreover, this study pioneers the identification of a non-linear relationship between corruption and economic growth within the Indian context, a facet unexplored in previous investigations.

This study aims to analyze the effects of e-government on corruption prevalence by using a sample of 29 European countries over the period 2012–2019.

This paper uses the panel corrected standard errors (PCSE) model to mitigate the problems of cross-sectional dependence. The PCSE model is also considered to reexamine the findings when the presence of heteroscedasticity, fixed effects and endogeneity issues are taken into account. The theoretical model incorporates one-year-lagged explanatory variables to deal with endogeneity. The autoregressive distributed lag method using the dynamic fixed effects estimator is chosen to deal with the time and country-fixed effects in the effort to measure the short- and long-run effects of e-government more precisely.

The results indicate that e-government plays a critical role in improving the population’s perception of corruption. Furthermore, e-government appears to have an effect in the short run. Notably, the estimation results show that there is a nonlinear relationship between e-government, especially user centricity and key enablers and the corruption perception index in the U-shaped curve.

The short-run and nonlinear effects of e-government on corruption prevalence suggest that the fight against corruption requires countries to pursue a consistent and continuous improvement and development of the e-government system.

The authors contribute to the literature by providing a consistent and precise answer to this relationship in the case of European countries. Another contribution of the work is to use diverse indicators to reflect e-government in a typical country, which helps us confirm the reliability and robustness of the findings.

This paper aims to investigate the role of corruption and income inequality in three-dimensional sustainable development in the post-Soviet countries.

The methodology is based on dynamic panel regression with the fixed effects approach.

The authors' findings depict that increasing corruption and income inequality undermine sustainable development. Specifically, increasing corruption and income inequality negatively affect sustainable development. Moreover, unemployment and trade liberalization negatively impact sustainable development, whereas foreign direct investments (FDIs) positively affect sustainable development.

Policy implications enclose galvanizing strong institutions and redistributive policy mechanisms that the bottom income groups enjoy in promoting sustainable development to keep away the distressful phase of corruption and income inequality.

This is the first paper on corruption, income inequality and sustainable development in the post-Soviet countries employing a sustainable development index (SDI), which is calculated by considering three factors including economic, social and environmental development.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-01-2023-0065

This study aims to investigate the intricate relationship between corruption and the credit costs faced by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in OECD countries, a critical yet underexplored area in financial crime research. The primary aim is to dissect and understand how corruption impacts SMEs’ access to credit, highlighting a significant yet overlooked aspect of financial crime. This research seeks to fill a gap in the literature by providing empirical insights into the economic consequences of corruption, specifically on SMEs financing.

This study used secondary panel data from the World Bank and OECD databases. The data covered the period 2007–2020 for 25 OECD countries. This study used interest rate for SMEs loans as a dependent variable and GDP per capita, inflation and corruption index as independent variables. This study used the panel autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model to examine the relationship between variables.

The empirical findings derived from Panel ARDL postulate an intriguing dichotomy in the effects of GDP per capita, inflation rate and corruption on interest rates in both the short and long run. It was discerned that an increase in GDP per capita and inflation rate correlates with a decrement in interest rates in the long run, suggesting a potential compromise by central banks between controlling inflation and fostering economic growth.

This paper makes a novel contribution to the field of financial crime by illuminating the often-overlooked economic dimensions of corruption in the context of SMEs financing. It provides a unique perspective on the ripple effects of corrupt practices in credit markets, enriching the academic discourse and informing practical approaches to combating financial crime.

This study aims to examine the association between anti-corruption corporate disclosure and earnings management practices by bringing evidence from a developed market.

The study uses data from non-financial FTSE 100 Shares in 2016 and 2017. This study develops a disclosure index to capture the anti-corruption disclosures and run pooled, fixed effects and generalized methods of moments regression models to explore the anti-corruption disclosure–earnings management association. This study also disentangles discretionary accruals into positive and negative, use adjusted discretionary accrual computation and take a more conservative view on discretionary accruals computation as an additional analysis.

The results show a negative and significant association between anti-corruption disclosure and earnings management practices. When disentangling discretionary accruals (overvalued/positive and undervalued/negative), the authors found that higher anti-corruption disclosures were negatively associated with positive discretionary accruals, but not associated with negative discretionary accruals. The additional analysis confirmed the previous results, showing that anti-corruption disclosures are perceived as a substantive practice, rather than a mere disclosure practice for legitimacy reasons.

This study contributes to debate on the symbolic versus the substantive uses of anti-corruption disclosures in the UK context.

As a consequence of the proposal of the Carbon Neutral and Carbon Peak policy in 2020, the Chinese Government is paying more attention to developing sustainability performance. This study aims to assess the direct influence of country-level and corporate anti-corruption measures on environmental, social and governance (ESG) and its three dimensions, besides ascertaining the moderating role of firm size.

This study used the system generalized method of moments on a sample of 820 Chinese listed firms from 2012 to 2021.

The findings show that country-level and corporate corruption negatively affect ESG performance. Corporate anti-corruption measures have a more pronounced positive influence on the sustainability performance of small firms than large firms due to the limited resources, lower political position and weaker refusal power of small firms.

The study has great implications for governments, corporate boards and ESG rating agencies. Government and corporate boards should mitigate the risks of country-level and corporate corruption to attain sustainable development goals. Rating agencies should add country-level and corporate corruption into the ESG evaluation system.

Some empirical results have proven that anti-corruption measures help reduce the emission of carbon dioxide, but few evidence shows how country-level and corporate corruption affect ESG and its three dimensions.

This paper aims to study the effect of country-level perceptions of corruption on commercial banks’ lending activity over the importance of loans and the quality of loan portfolios of banks in Europe.

The paper uses country-level perceptions of corruption scores from Transparency International, individual bank-specific data from ORBIS and macroeconomic data from the World Bank. The sample is composed of 640 commercial banks in 42 European countries from 2013 to 2019. The authors estimate, by pooled OLS, the relationship between corruption and the importance of loans and the quality of the banks’ loan portfolios. In addition, several robustness tests reinforce the results.

The results show that corruption negatively impacts the importance of loans in bank assets and positively impacts the proportion of bad loans. In addition, trade openness increases the weight of loans and the weight of nonperforming loans. Bank size, capital and risk also affect bank lending activity. Finally, European Monetary Union (EMU) membership reinforces the negative (positive) effect on loans (bad loans).

The results highlight the importance of fighting corruption. Governments, regulators and banks benefit from pursuing transparency-oriented policies to decrease the perception of corruption and foster economic development.

The literature on the impact of corruption on bank lending activity focuses mainly on high-corruption countries. This paper studies the European case, scarcely investigated in the literature, in the aftermath of two international financial crises and when significant regulatory transformations in banking supervision were instituted in the EMU countries.

The purpose of this study is to examine mediating role of public sector governance in the relationship between entrepreneurship and economic growth in the Palestinian context during the years 2005–2020.

The necessary data were collected from the World Bank website and the annual financial reports of the Palestinian Monetary Authority. To achieve the study’s objectives, the researcher used content analysis method and regression model.

There is an effect of some dimensions of entrepreneurship (starting a business, obtaining credit, women starting a business) and public sector governance with dimensions (voice and accountability, political stability and absence of violence, effectiveness of government performance, organizational quality, the rule of law and control of corruption) on economic growth. In addition, there is no mediating effect of public sector governance in the relationship between entrepreneurship and economic growth.

The study helps in enhancing the elements of entrepreneurship by evaluating public governance in Palestine. It also offers future researchers a comprehensive vision that encourages Palestinian economic growth.

The paper contributes to showing the reality of public governance indicators for the Palestinian context and the amount of support for entrepreneurial activities indicators that affect economic growth.

Trying to activate cooperation mechanisms between government institutions and entrepreneurial institutions to adopt creative projects and ideas, especially for women, needs to focus on activating the principles of public sector governance in addition to facilitating administrative and financial procedures to start commercial projects in a way that enhances economic growth with the need to achieve the highest level of public sector governance indicators.

This study aims to re-examine the corruption and sustainable development nexus in Africa and offer a contemporary analytical review and analysis of that relationship in the region.

Drawing on the available and accessible relevant data from credible sources, this work quantifies, outlines and analyses the nexus between corruption and sustainable development, as it applies primarily to sub-Saharan Africa. It uses the relevant disaggregated data and also complements that with the results of reliable empirical studies to further cross-reference and demonstrate the corruption and sustainable development nexus.

It is shown that corruption in Africa continues to be negatively associated with sustainable development objectives and that, in turn, will continue to affect the continent’s progress in achieving sustainable development. Undoubtedly, corruption is very damaging to economies across all nations and regions. However, in Africa, this impact on sustainable development has been particularly severe and ongoing. Consequently, the views expressed several decades ago of corruption being able to grease the wheels and potentially contribute to economic development is not valid and, in fact, has been severally discredited over the years.

The main value of the paper is the insights it provides, and with cross-reference to the empirical literature and time series data, on the corruption and sustainable development nexus in Africa.