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The side effects of disguised bribes are hidden by their apparent good consequences (as pseudo-gifts). The aim of the chapter is to unveil to what extent pseudo-gifts (as disguised bribes) could distort the cultural, social, and communicational functions of gift-giving practices. We will firstly describe how disguised bribes could be analyzed from a Sartrean perspective, given that Sartre’s notion of bad faith could help to better understand the three basic kinds of substantive loss which follow from disguised bribes: (a) the loss of commonalities (the cultural function of gift-giving as distorted by disguised bribes: Malinowski’s notion of culture): we will analyze the phenomenon of guanxi; (b) the loss of social bonds (the social function of gift-giving as distorted by disguised bribes: Durkheim’s notion of culture); (c) the loss of communicability, and the arising of an empty truth (the communicational function of gift-giving as distorted by disguised bribes: Jaspers’ notion of truth claims). Gift-giving practices are culturally rooted. This is the first level of analysis (surface). Seizing the social and moral function of gift-giving practices unveils the second level of analysis (beneath-the-surface). Describing the communicational function of gift-giving practices opens the door to the third level of analysis (exchanges of truth claims). Bribery is the distortion of those basic functions of gift-giving practices. We are then facing an empty truth (the communicational function of culture is distorted).

Any concept of disguised bribes must be empirically tested. The way the cultural, social and communication functions of gift-giving practices are distorted could vary from one culture to another. Future research could check how such distortions arise in given societal cultures. It could then distinguish the side effects of disguised bribes, either from a cultural viewpoint, or from social perspective, or even from a communicational pattern of reference. Unveiling the multiple ways of distorting gift-giving practices could help decision-makers to better understand the frontiers between bribery and gift-giving. Emphasizing the various functions of gift-giving practices, from a philosophical and sociological perspective, could allow business decision-makers to raise their ethical awareness.

I provide an overview of the literature that explores whether there are gender differences in corruption using economic decision-making experiments designed to simulate corrupt transactions usually involving acts of bribery between a firm and a government official. A primary focus of the chapter is to critically examine this evidence with a view to addressing the following question: will increased female participation in public life – both in government and bureaucracy – lead to reduced corruption? I find that across a wide variety of experiments, studying different aspects of corruption, it is either the case that women behave in a more pro-social and less corrupt manner than men or that there are no significant gender differences. There are no studies that find men to be less corrupt. Consequently, I conclude by arguing that we can answer the question posed above in the affirmative.

The purpose of this study is to examine how corruption affects the prevalence of product and process innovation by firms.

This study uses firm-level data from the 2012–2016 Business Environment Enterprise Performance Surveys and utilizes a conditional mixed process model to address endogeneity concerns, taking bribery as a measure of corruption.

The study shows that measures of bribery are positively and robustly associated with innovation but mainly for firms reporting many competitors. The results are stronger for firms reporting more obstacles. Both findings support the inference that bribes facilitate innovation by allowing firms to evade regulatory obstacles.

The current research on corruption's effect on innovation restricts the association to be uniform across the sample, but this study shows that the impact depends on the degree of competition faced by a firm. In addition, the data used in this study cover 30 economies in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and thus contributes to determining the effects of anticorruption practices in emerging countries.

Understanding the drivers of corruption involvement is critical for the design of interventions aimed at reducing the incidence of corruption and easing the process of obtaining services. In many developing countries particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, traditional cultures dictate that women are responsible for performing physically demanding household chores such as fetching water, collecting and carrying firewood over long distances. This paper aims to examine the implications of these social norms on bribe involvements in sub-Saharan Africa.

This study uses micro-level data on bribe involvement across 20 sub-Saharan African countries. It also applies multiple estimation approaches to correct for differences in exposure to government officials, which then allows for estimating the gender differences in bribe involvement. Probit, Heckman selectivity and Lee bound estimation approaches are adopted for the purpose.

The author find that social norms impact bribe involvement of men and women in sub-Saharan Africa. Specifically, the author find lower involvement of men in bribery in sub-Saharan when household services, are at stake compared to other services. In effect the gender differences in bribe involvement, even though robust for other services that are not household related, disappears when household services are at stake. The author shed light on how social and cultural norms could impact bribery outcomes.

Findings from this study shows that inefficiencies in public utility delivery in sub-Sahran Africa can create antisocial behavior and that interventions geared toward improvement access to utility can reduced inequality in access to services.

The purpose of this paper is to study the reasons and decision-making processes of heterogeneous firms’ bribery behavior, and how they will affect an aggregate economy’s development and corruption status.

The authors build a dynamic model to study a firm’s joint decision to bribe and invest, and how the decision is determined by its production and infrastructure status. The authors simulate the firm-level decision and development paths, and then build an aggregate economy consisting of heterogeneous firms. The authors then also simulate the development and corruption growth paths of the economy, by calibrating the model according to Chinese manufacturing firms in 2012.

Following the simulation results, the authors conduct counterfactual policy analyses. By comparing between the simulation results of two different counterfactual scenarios, the authors study how a government could control bribing better – as to decrease the number of bribers, and the average amount of the bribery payments. It is found that directly raising the bribery costs works more efficiently in controlling corruption, compared with reducing the benefits received by the bribers. The finding provides insightful policy implications for the government to clear up its economy.

The paper makes a novel and unique contribution to the literature by filling the current theoretical gap. The authors introduce a dynamic firm-level model to interpret firms’ bribery decisions and replicate the aggregate stylized facts. The paper innovatively treats bribery as both discrete and continuous decisions. Given both types of bribery decisions, now the authors can successfully simulate and quantify a firm’s intertemporal status and growth path.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of multinational enterprises’ (MNEs) home country corruption in their decision to bribe officials in foreign host countries.

A model that predicts MNE bribing by controlling for a multitude of foreign host country factors is used. The information contained in the orthogonal residuals from this model is exploited to see whether MNE’s home country factors, particularly the level of public corruption, work to amplify illegal behavior by respective MNE in abroad.

MNEs pay more in bribes when the foreign officials they face are more corrupt. This behavior worsens when MNE’s home country has more corruption.

All UN member countries are signatories to the UN Convention against Corruption that proscribes the bribing of foreign public officials by respective MNEs. The Convention’s reliance on home country enforcement of stipulations against the bribing of foreign officials by respective MNEs exposes its efficacy of the malfeasance of home country public officials.

This paper extends the literature to an examination of MNE’s use of bribes in a world with a global anti-corruption regime. Additionally, it ties MNE behavior in foreign countries to corruption in MNE’s home country.

This paper aims to study how firms’ longitudinal and dynamic growth will be affected by their bribing decisions to address the controversies existing in the extant literature on the impacts of briberies.

The authors acquired information from Enterprise Survey by the World Bank and compiled a unique panel data set including firms from five South American countries between 2006 and 2017. The authors used multiple methods to estimate firms’ productivity. A comprehensive inspection of firms’ longitudinal development using a two-step estimation method that addressed the endogeneity issue was then conducted.

Bribery could significantly shorten the waiting time for resources to become available. However, bribery also substantially and robustly slows down firms’ productivity growth over time. Meanwhile, a bribing firm is very likely to bribe again in the future.

This paper contributes to the extant literature by pioneering the empirical study of firms’ bribing decisions and their longitudinal growth. First, the authors constructed unique panel data and established a longitudinal investigation upon firms’ dynamic growth after bribing, filling the literature gap by studying the time-lagging effect of bribery on firms’ growth. Second, the authors performed a comprehensive overview of South American firms’ growth by looking into the dynamics of their production, employment, resource delay and productivity across years. Third, the authors found that bribing exerted contingent impacts upon firms’ growth, reconciling the mixed evidence in the literature.

Using indices of bribe for 19 countries, this study examines the determinants of bribe paying in international business. There is a strong positive correlation between countries where bribe taking is highly prevalent and those countries that are most likely to offer bribes. The propensity to give bribes is determined by economic factors such as per capita income and degree of economic freedom in the country, cultural factors such as power distance and masculinity; and legal regulatory factors such as accounting and tax treatment of bribes. It appears that, to eliminate international bribery, the supply side needs to be addressed in addition to the demand for bribes.

This paper seeks to examine the extent to which national cultural characteristics impact the propensity of firms based in the country to engage in bribery to gain advantages when conducting business overseas.

A set of statistical analyses – bivariate correlations and regression – was performed on data for five cultural variables and one economic variable for 30 countries to ascertain the relationship between these variables on a country's Bribe Payers Index, a measure of bribe giving.

The results indicate that firms from countries low on power distance or long‐term orientation, or high on individualism, are less likely to engage in bribe giving. However, when the level of economic development in the home country as measured by per capita income is included, the impact of cultural factors is muted considerably. Firms from high‐income countries are less likely to give bribes.

Richer countries are likely to have certain practices that create a business ethos where bribing is the exception, not the rule, in conducting business. The study is based on a one‐time sample of just 30 countries for which bribe‐giving data are available. The data culture is limited to the countries studied by Hofstede.

Bribery is less a cultural phenomenon; instead, it is bred in poverty and illustrative of business behavior occurring in a highly regulated and inward‐looking economy. As a country prospers and the domestic operating environment becomes more hygienic, it will have a salutary effect on the international behavior of the firms based in that country.

The study mediates the debate between cultural and economic determinism and provides empirical evidence that bribe‐giving is largely an expression of economic imperatives and not cultural predisposition.

The paper aims to reveal some uncertain correlations and presumptions about corruption.

The paper defines corruption as a social phenomenon. It presents two basic components of that phenomenon: unreasonable preferential treatment and abuse of power. The paper addresses the moral issue that is implied in any phenomenon of corruption. The author will use the Corruption Perception Index and the Bribe Payers Index of Transparency International as well as the International Country Risk Guide, in order to check to what extent some correlations or presumptions about corruption could be reliable, at least as hypotheses.

Uncertain correlations and presumptions about corruption actually create an effect of distorted interpretation. They could cause ideological biases that distort our perception of corruption in developing and developed countries.

The paper does not take into account the multiple expressions of gift‐giving practices around the world and the way such practices could be confused with corruption.

Being aware of our “presumptions” about corruption will help us to choose relevant strategies to combat corrupt practices. This study has implications for business corporations, governments and IFIs. It reveals how the awareness of such uncertainties and presumptions about corruption is related to the CSR discourse.

The originality of the paper is to unveil some presumptions about corruption that have not been compared with the results obtained from the Corruption Perception Index, the Bribe Payers Index and the International Country Risk Guide.