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

Download or read book Governance and State-Owned Enterprises: How Costly is Corruption? written by Ms.Anja Baum and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2019-11-22 with total page 43 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.