Corruption and Composition of Foreign Direct Investment: Firm-Level Evidence

Beata K. Smarzynska and Shang-Jin Wei
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Beata Smarzynska Javorcik ()

No 7969, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper studies the impact of corruption in a host country on foreign investor's preference for a joint venture versus a wholly-owned subsidiary. There is a basic trade-off in using local partners. On the one hand, corruption makes local bureaucracy less transparent and increases the value of using a local partner to cut through the bureaucratic maze. On the other hand, corruption decreases the effective protection of investor's intangible assets and lowers the probability that disputes between foreign and domestic partners will be adjudicated fairly, which reduces the value of having a local partner. The importance of protecting intangible assets increases with investor's technological sophistication, which tilts the preference away from joint ventures in a corrupt country. Empirical tests of the hypothesis on a firm-level data set show that corruption reduces inward FDI and shifts the ownership structure towards joint ventures. Technologically more advanced firms are found to be less likely to engage in joint ventures.

JEL-codes: F23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: Written
Note: IFM ITI
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w7969.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:7969

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w7969
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc
Address: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by ().