Abstract
This study investigates the effects of paying bribes on access to credit for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Bribery is variously portrayed, in the literature, as greasing the wheel (helping) or sand in the wheel (impeding) applications for credit. Studies supporting both perspectives leave the issue unresolved, encouraging further analysis, using reliable data and robust analytic methods. An examination of The World Bank Enterprise Surveys of SME data for India, using an instrumental variable probit model, provides a more definitive answer. SME bribery is detrimental to accessing credit and more so for firms that have been in business for many years and operating on a small scale. Involvement of supply and demand side forces increases the need for multiple control variables. From a supply side perspective, high corruption increases difficulties for financial institutions to control borrower risk and recover loans. Accordingly, financial institutions reduce their lending to SMEs, which mostly belong to a high-risk category. Unlike large firms, SMEs paying bribes to grease the wheel are drawn to the informal sector, avoiding attention from officials. Where SMEs pay bribes in the formal sector, it is noticed and likely to increase the probability that other parties will also demand payments. The demand side argument regards bribes as tax, increasing loan costs to SMEs. Consequently, making significant bribes decreases SMEs’ profitability. Less profitable SMEs may not obtain access to credit. From a policy perspective, anti-corruption measures, in emerging and low-income economies, are vital for developing SMEs and stimulating significant welfare gains.
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Notes
The Enterprise Surveys undertaken by the World Bank in 2014 (www.enterprisesurveys.org) categorise Indian firms having up to 99 employees as SMEs, and that is the definition used in this study. Firms with 5 to 19 employees are categorised as small firms, and those with 20 to 99 employees are defined as medium-sized.
An endogeneity problem occurs when an explanatory variable is correlated with the error term (Wooldridge 2002). Endogeneity can arise from the following sources: unobservable heterogeneity, simultaneity, omitted variable biases and reverse causality.
The IPRI is an annual comparative study that aims to quantify the strength of property rights—both physical and intellectual—and to rank countries accordingly. The IPRI scores and ranks each country based on ten factors reflecting the state of its legal and political environment, physical property rights and intellectual property rights. The higher the score of IPRI, the higher the strength of property rights. Finland received the highest score of 8.3/10.
The World Bank’s Enterprise Surveys offer an expansive array of economic data on 130,000 firms in 135 countries. The World Bank Enterprise Survey website provides details as to how the surveys are conducted (http://www.enterprisesurveys.org). An Enterprise survey is a firm-level survey of a representative sample of an economy’s private sector. The surveys cover a broad range of business environment topics including access to finance, corruption, infrastructure, crime, competition and performance measures.
Creating a dichotomous variable for private foreign individuals, company- or organisation-owned firms, government or state-owned firms and other firm-owned firms groups (denoted as group 1) and other firms (denoted as group 2), we check the credit accessibility differences using ANOVA, which confirms that different ownership forms do not exhibit the same impact on credit accessibility. Hence, we have excluded group 1.
Overdraft facility is a short-term credit agreement with the bank. This facilitates an account holder to use or withdraw more than they have in their account, without exceeding a specified maximum amount. An overdraft facility can be offered on a secured (assets are pledged as security) or unsecured (no assets are pledged as security) basis.
In Section 5—Robustness, we used alternative proxies of credit constraints and report the robustness of results.
The smaller the correlation between the instrument and the endogenous variable, the larger the standard errors of the instrumental variable estimator will be. Furthermore, low correlation between the instrument and the endogenous variable can drive towards asymptotic-biased estimators (Wooldridge 2002).
India consists of 29 states and 7 union territories. The National Capital Territory of Delhi is the administrative capital territory of India and Mumbai is the financial, commercial and entertainment capital of India.
Gujarati and Porter (2003) suggest that there is no evidence of multicollinearity if the VIF (variance inflation factor) value is below the critical level of 10.
If both variables are dichotomous, Pearson correlation = Spearman correlation = Kendall’s tau. Most of our model variables are dichotomous.
The results are not reported to save space but are available from the authors upon request.
Due to the low number of observations, some interactions variables with Bribe_Intensity are dropped. Therefore, we only have plots for the interaction terms of the variables with Bribe_D.
Second robustness test results are not reported in order to save space and are available from the authors upon request.
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Hewa Wellalage, N., Locke, S. & Samujh, H. Firm bribery and credit access: evidence from Indian SMEs. Small Bus Econ 55, 283–304 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-019-00161-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-019-00161-w