Do the Interactions between Corruption and Financial Liberalization Affect Economic Growth? Evidence from OPEC

Investigating the effect of government corruption and financial liberalization on economic growth is a fundamental issue in recent economic literature. However, considering these two phenomena simultaneously have been ignored by researchers. This paper, empirically and theoretically, studies how negative effect of corruption can be affected by financial liberalization. The results show that, by liberalizing financial account, high corrupt countries levy more taxes and therefore the negative effect of corruption on economic growth intensified. In empirical model, we include OPEC countries for the duration of 1990-2013. Estimation results by GMM method show that the negative signs of the interaction between financial liberalization and corruption imply that the partial impact of financial openness on economic growth decreases as the degree of corruption increases.