Exports and cross-national corruption: A disaggregated examination Rajeev K. Goel a , Iikka Korhonen b, * a Illinois State University, United States b Bank of Finland, PO Box 160, FI-00101 Helsinki, Finland 1. Introduction Most of the effects of corruption on economic activity are undesirable. There is ample evidence that corruption tends to hamper economic growth (see, e.g., Boschini et al., 2007; Bulte and Damania, 2008; Davis and Tilton, 2005; Kronenberg, 2004; Leite and Weidmann, 2002), although it seems that in some cases corruption can actually improve economic efficiency in countries with underdeveloped institutional set-ups (see, e.g., Lui, 1985; Me ´ on and Weill, 2008; also Me ´ on and Sekkat, 2005). The study of corruption is important both because of its prevalence and an increasing consensus that Economic Systems 35 (2011) 109–124 ARTICLE INFO Article history: Received 22 March 2010 Received in revised form 9 October 2010 Accepted 9 October 2010 Available online 17 November 2010 JEL classification: H11 K42 O13 Keywords: Corruption Exports Resource curse Government Quantile regression ABSTRACT This paper empirically examines the relation between categories of exports and corruption across countries. Aggregate exports and agricultural exports tend to decrease corruption, while fuel exports increase corruption. The influence of agricultural exports in more pronounced in more corrupt nations, while fuel exports contribute to corruption in least corrupt nations. Manufacturing and ore exports, on the other hand, generally fail to show significant impacts on corruption. Our findings demonstrate that the resource curse is sensitive to prevailing corruption levels, and this finding is novel in the literature. Consistent with the extant literature, corruption decreases with income, and (at some corruption levels) as political freedom increases, and with larger government size. The findings are fairly robust to an alternate corruption measure. ß 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. * Corresponding author. Tel.: +358 10 831 2271; fax: +358 10 831 2294. E-mail address: iikka.korhonen@bof.fi (I. Korhonen). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Economic Systems journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ecosys 0939-3625/$ – see front matter ß 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ecosys.2010.10.002