Corruption and Export Performance in Post-communist Countries: Evidence from Firm-level Data

In this paper we investigate the empirical relationship between corruption and export performance of firms in 30 post-communist countries. Our analytical framework refers to the recent strand in the new trade theory literature based on the Melitz (2003) model that stresses the importance of firm productivity and trade costs in entering the export markets. The empirical implementation of the theoretical framework is based on the fractional logit model and the IV–V BEEPS dataset covering the period 2008‒2014. Our empirical results for over 20 thousand surveyed companies confirm the negative and statistically significant relationship between corruption and export performance in post-communist countries.