Governance and State-Owned Enterprises: How Costly is Corruption?

Anja Baum, Clay Hackney, Paulo Medas and Mouhamadou Sy

No 2019/253, IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund

Abstract: State-owned enterprises (SOEs) are present in key sectors of the economies around the world. While they can provide an important public service, there is widespread concern that their activities are negatively affected by corruption. However, there is limited cross-country analysis on the costs of corruption for SOEs. We present new evidence on how corruption affects the performance of SOEs using firm level data across a large number of countries. One striking result is that SOEs perform as well as private firms in core sectors when corruption is low. Taking advantage of a novel database reforms, we also show that SOE governance reforms can generate significant performance gains.

Keywords: WP; operating profit; governance reform; current ratio; private firm; solid windowtext; SOE performance; SOE conditionality; firm-level indicators; SOE reform; construction firm; Corruption; Public enterprises; Electricity; Public expenditure review; Labor costs; Global (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43
Date: 2019-11-22
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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