Are Corruption and Taxation Really Harmful to Growth? Firm-Level Evidence

Exploiting a unique data set containing information on the estimated bribe payments of Ugandan firms, we study the relationship between bribery payments, taxes and firm growth over the period 1995-97. Using industry-location averages to circumvent the potential problem of endogeneity, and to deal with issues of measurement error, we find that both the rate of taxation and bribery are negatively correlated with firm growth. For the full data set, a one-percentage point increase in the bribery rate is associated with a reduction in firm growth of three percentage points, an effect that is about three times greater than that of taxation. Moreover, after outliers are excluded, we find a much greater negative impact of bribery on growth, while the effect of taxation is considerably reduced. This provides some validation for firm-level theories of corruption which posit that corruption retards the development process to an even greater extent than taxation.