Hélène Laurent

Article de revue

Entry-regulation and corruption: grease or sand in the wheels of entrepreneurship? Fresh evidence according to entrepreneurial motives

Marcus Dejardin, Hélène Laurent, Small Business Economics, Vol. 62, No. 3, pp. 1223-1272, 11/2023

Résumé Plain English Summary Corruption and regulation can have ambiguous relationships with entrepreneurship unless you take a careful look at it. We examine the impact of corruption and entry-regulation on opportunity and necessity-motivated entrepreneurship within different economic development contexts. Corruption and entry-regulation correlate negatively with entrepreneurship but might have a tempering effect on each other. Thus, we consider whether corruption reduces the negative impact of entry-regulation on entrepreneurship while remaining globally negative (i.e., the “weak view”) or if it completely counterbalance the negative effect (the “strong view”). Exploiting a cross-country dataset on 105 countries over the 2003–2016 period, we find that, while corruption might somewhat temper the negative impact of a heavy administrative machinery in developing countries, this tempering effect of corruption will generally be non-significant. Furthermore, our findings suggest that corruption deters opportunity-motivated entrepreneurship—the type of entrepreneurship that may contribute the most to productivity, economic growth and development. Corruption and regulation would then be particularly harmful for economic development. The policy-maker tackling these issues would do well to consider direct effects and possible interrelationships according to context.

Mots clés Entreprenarial motives, Necessity, Opportunity, Sand the wheels, Grease the wheels, Doing business, Régulation, Corruption, Entrepreneurship

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