How do entrepreneurship and corruption relate to innovation and competitiveness?
Description
The literature shows a strong relationship between innovation and competitiveness. Innovation alone does not guarantee its impacts, making entrepreneurship key to converting innovations into new businesses. On the other hand, entrepreneurship is subject to corruption, and research exploring these two variables presents ambiguous or inconclusive results. Thus, studying these four variables acting concomitantly helps to achieve a deeper understanding of these relationships. This work aims to verify the role of entrepreneurship in the relationship between innovation and competitiveness and whether corruption has positive or negative effects on entrepreneurship. Secondary data from the Global Competitiveness Report and the Entrepreneurship Database project from The World Bank were used, generating a sample of 101 countries with data from both sources. The analysis adopted mediation and moderated mediation techniques. The results show the mediating role of entrepreneurship in the relationship between innovation and global competitiveness. Furthermore, the study found that corruption has a moderating effect on the relationship between entrepreneurship and competitiveness, verifying a decrease in the mediating effect of entrepreneurship on the proposed model. Counterintuitively, the findings revealed that the greater the corruption in the country, the greater the effect of innovation on competitiveness via entrepreneurship. It also shows the influence of corruption in opening new businesses and increasing the countries’ competitiveness. The research demonstrates the importance of measuring the level of entrepreneurship in traditional international reports to accurately analyze the countries’ stage of development and the population’s well-being.
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This study used secondary data from two sources, the Global Competitiveness Report (GCR), issued by the World Economic Forum (Schwab, 2019), and The Entrepreneurship Database project, published by The World Bank (The World Bank, 2021). The transversal research was conducted with data from 2019, the last year both organizations updated their databases due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The GCR has information from 141 countries, while the Entrepreneurship Database offers data from 122. Only data from countries included in both sources were considered, totaling 101 countries. Data were analyzed with the software IBM SPSS Statistics® 20.0. The models used were 4 (simple mediation) and 14 (moderated mediation) of PROCESS macro (Hayes, 2012, 2018), both using the ordinary least square (OLS) estimation technique.