Revisiting the Missing Middle: Production and Corruption

Hien Thu Pham and Shino Takayama ()
Additional contact information
Hien Thu Pham: Oregon State University, USA

No WP022015, CEPA Working Papers Series from University of Queensland, School of Economics

Abstract: This paper investigates empirically the relationship between firm size and production efficiency, and the relationship between firm size and the likelihood of paying bribes using firm-level data from Vietnam. Our analysis indicates that middle-sized firms’ production efficiencies tend to be lower than small-sized or large-sized firms in most of the manufacturing industries, and as firm size increases, the likelihood of paying bribes also increases. Firm size distribution has been a particular concern of economists for almost a century, and more recently, there has been increasing interest in the firm size distribution of developing nations, particularly the missing middle phenomenon, which refers to the fact that the distribution of firm size in developing countries tends to be bimodal. Our empirical results shed light on the relationship between firm size, production and corruption, and provide insights into these relations.

Keywords: Bribe; Firm size distribution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D21 D22 L25 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec and nep-sea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://economics.uq.edu.au/files/5115/WP022015.pdf (application/pdf)

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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:qld:uqcepa:100

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPA Working Papers Series from University of Queensland, School of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SOE IT ().