Investimento direto estrangeiro em países membros da IOSCO: a corrupção como fragilidade institucional

Abstract

The research addressed foreign direct investment (FDI) and corruption as an institutional weakness, an issue considered important for international finance. Previous studies examined FDI from macroeconomic determinants, encouraging beautiful seminal theoretical approaches. The problem is that when deciding to enter another country, the investor does not have all the information about the rules of the game in the host country, because of this, studying limitations and incentives of the institutional matrix of a country can facilitate the understanding about FDI. Even the studies that started from the institutional perspective did not consider corruption as a weakness. The general objective of this study was to analyze whether corruption, as a representative factor of institutional fragility, establishes a negative relationship with the accumulated values of foreign direct investments. It was a quantitative research using secondary data from IOSCO member countries. The econometric technique used was the analysis of ordinary least squares data, in the form of panel data. The study found a negative relationship between the accumulated FDI values and the representative metrics of formal and informal rules. The fragility of the formal system was calculated from the number of irregularities pointed out by Organs regulatory bodies of the capital market, as a proxy for corruption. While, the fragility of informal rules, considered the index of perception about the presence of corruption. The results of this study indicate that the variability in the amount of FDI values cannot be explained exclusively by economic factors, in addition, the fragility of a society's formal and informal system must be considered. When this occurs, corruption gains ground and becomes perceived as acceptable behavior; considered a behavior that is part of the game, therefore inhibiting the IDE.