Our paper examines the relationship between institutional structures and the level of financial markets development in Africa. Our paper contributes to the extant literature by using other financial market development variables—ease of access to loans and venture capital availability—that have not before been used to analyzed how institutional structures influence the level of financial markets development in the context of Africa. We employ a two-step generalized method of moment estimator with corrected standard errors to examine this. We demonstrate that a high-quality institutional environment is relevant in explaining ease of access to loans and venture capital availability in Africa. Based on these results, our paper argues that good institutional structures could help stimulate the level of financial markets development in Africa. However, to attain this feat, African governments need to strengthen institutions through effective enforcement of laws to foster compliance in a specifically def...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/23322039.2018.1488342

Institutional structures and financial market development in Africa

Corruption is one of the most pervasive obstacles to economic and social development. However, in the existing literature it appears that corruption seems to be less harmful in some countries than in others. The most striking examples are well known as the "East Asian paradox": countries displaying exceptional growth records despite having thriving corruption cultures. The aim of this paper is to explain the high corruption but fast economic growth puzzle in China by providing firm-level evidence of the relation between corruption and growth and investigating how financial development influences the former relationship. Our empirical results show that corruption is likely to contribute to firms' growth. We further highlight the substitution relationship between corruption and financial development on firm growth. This means that corruption appears not to be a vital constraint on firm growth if financial markets are underdeveloped. However, pervasive corruption deters firm growth where there are more developed financial markets. This implies that fast firm growth will not be observed until a later stage of China's development when financial markets are well-functioning and corruption is under control. Furthermore, the substitution relationship exists in the private and state-owned firms. Geographically, similar results can be seen in the Southeast and Central regions.

Corruption and Firm Growth: Evidence from China

The current study explains how corruption, terrorism, political stability and oil price has an effect on on the Iraq stock exchange utilizing corruption perception index as a proxy of corruption, global terrorism index as proxy for terrorism, political stability and oil price with ISX60 index as proxy of stock market for the period (2005-2019) using Ordinary Least Square method. The results show that the level of corruption, terrorism activities and political stability coefficient is significantly positive with Iraq stock exchange. In contrast, the oil price coefficient is significantly negative with Iraq stock exchange, which means that lower levels of corruption, less terrorism activities and more stability in political system have strong influence on stock market development in Iraq. The study concludes that the explanatory variables are important for Iraq stock exchange. Hence, the study suggests the policy makers to develop stock market by implementing policies and strategies to overcome high level of corruption, terrorism activities especially after ISIS/ISIL announcement has been made public. There is a need for transparency and creating stable political environment through good governance practices in order to attract more foreign investment and promote economic development. Factors like terrorism and corruption make economic and political systems unstable and has an adverse effect on on Iraq’s stock exchange performance.

https://www.koreascience.or.kr:443/article/JAKO202029062616608.pdf

Corruption, Terrorism and the Stock Market: The Evidence from Iraq

This study explores the link between institutional quality, ethical behaviors of firms, and market regulations on stock market developments. The dynamic panel regression analysis and moderation analysis with single‐threshold modeling approaches were exploited to test the hypotheses. The results show that overall institutional quality with its six indicators are significant predictors of stock market development taking into account that they have varying influence on different stock market development proxy. Moreover, moderation analysis showed that the ethical behavior of firms and market regulations mostly acts as a substitute and sometimes acts as a complement for institutional quality in stock market development.

The link between institutional quality, ethical behaviors of firms, and market regulations on stock market developments

Using macroeconomic factors as control variables, this paper examines the impact of corruption on the development of the stock market in East Asia and the Pacific (EAP) from 2008 to 2018. The research model uses GMM techniques to estimate panel data on two sub-sets of data, including five developed markets and seven emerging markets, and a dataset of both market groups. The market capitalization and the stock transaction value relative to GDP represent the development of the stock market, and the corruption control index represents the corruption factor. The empirical results found that corruption has a positive impact on the EAP stock market capitalization with the entire sample data set, which positively affects both size of the market capitalization value and value of stock transactions in underdeveloped markets. However, it is not statistically significant in explaining the development of developed stock markets. Besides, macroeconomic factors such as inflation, interest rates, savings, and credit affect some stock markets at EAP. Compared to previous studies, the article’s results found that corruption affects stock market capitalization and has a positive impact on stock liquidity in underdeveloped stock markets. Corruption affects more underdeveloped stock markets than developed stock markets. This may be due to the implicit relationship of economic benefits between large enterprises and officials in underdeveloped markets.

/pdf/corruption-and-stock-market-development-in-eap-countries-4ncrwcilxd.pdf

Corruption and stock market development in EAP countries

The theoretical relationship between corruption and stock market development has been debated quite extensively in the literature, yet the evidence on the impact of corruption on stock market development remains contradictory and ambiguous. This paper investigates the impact of corruption, as measured by Corruption Perception Index (CPI) published by Transparency International, on stock market development focusing exclusively on Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries with its special characteristics of combining richness with relatively high level of corruption. Results from an estimation of alternative regression models on a panel of six GCC countries over the period 2003–2011, through which CPI is legitimately comparable, confirms a positive impact of corruption on stock market development, where the latter is measured by market capitalization. This is consistent with the view that corruption greases the wheels of economy by expediting transactions and allowing private firms to overcome governmentally imposed inefficiencies.

/pdf/corruption-and-stock-market-development-new-evidence-from-lkeerhcwa0.pdf

Moaz Alsherfawi Aljazaerli

Papers

Corruption and Stock Market Development: New Evidence from GCC Countries