Page 164 www.ijiras.com | Email: contact@ijiras.com International Journal of Innovative Research and Advanced Studies (IJIRAS) Volume 7 Issue 2, February 2020 ISSN: 2394-4404 A Critical Assessment Of The Impact Of Corruption On The Economic And Social Development Of Cameroon: A Positivism Perspective Ndah Grimbald (Ph.D. Fellow) Nchise Delphine Nchang (Ph.D. Fellow) Penn Emmanuel Mbuh (Ph.D. Fellow) ICT University, Department of Business Management and Sustainability (BMS) Yaounde - Cameroon I. INTRODUCTION „Corruption‟ originates from the Latin word–corrumpere, which means „bribe, mar or destroy‟ (Crouch T, 2012). Much evidence suggests that corruption has been an aged old practice from time immemorial, and, in recent times, it has occupied a front seat in global discussions (Tanzi V, 1998). According to the World Bank, corruption can generally be defined or described as the abuse of public power or corporate office for private benefit (World Bank, 2005). Types of corruption include grand corruption, which involves corruption that pervades the highest level of national Government, to petty corruption, the exchange of very small amounts of money or the granting of minor favours by those in minor positions. Regardless of the scope of corruption, such acts undermine the development of civil society and exacerbate poverty, especially when public resources that would have been used to finance people‟s aspirations for a better life are mismanaged or abused by public officials (John Sullivan and Aleksander Shkolnikov, 2006). Corruption manifests itselfs in many ways: as bribery, financial leakage, conflict of interest, embezzlement, false accounting, fraud, influence peddling, nepotism, grand corruption, and illicit financial flows (UNPAN, 2002 as cited Abstract: The purpose of this study is to critically assess the impact of corruption on the economic and social development of Cameroon. The study was guided by the epistemology of positivism and followed the causal research design in quantitative method of analysis. A sample size of 200 individuals constituted of Parliamentarians, Senators, Company Managers, individual entrepreneurs, students and the public in general was drawn from the capital city of Yaoundé, Cameroon, using simple random probability sampling. Three causal relationships were hypothesized to produce law-like generalisations in this study and hypotheses 1 and 2 (see table 3) were found to be statistically significant. The findings of this study revealed that high level embezzlement of public funds and illicit financial flows have a statistically significant negative impact on the economic and social development of Cameroon. However, the study is limited in that its research scope was centred only on participants in Yaoundé, and other major cities like Douala, the economic capital of Cameroon were not covered in this study. It is therefore recommended that further studies should cover a sizeable portion of the country. The practical implication of this study is that it will contribute to the level of awareness of the negative and disastrous consequences corruption has on the economic and social progress of the Cameroon economy. It will also help in guiding government overall policy towards the fight against corruption in Cameroon. The originality and value contribution of this study is ascertained by the validity and reliability tests that were conducted here-in. Keywords: Grand Corruption, Economic Development, Social Development, Kleptocracy