Does corruption in exporter and importer country influence international trade?

We investigate whether bilateral exports of goods flowing from Vietnam to its 46 top trading partners are affected by corruption over the period 2000–2014. We capture the effects of corruption of Vietnam and her trade partners, separately using the corruption perception index (CPI) developed by Transparency International. The CPI captures both bureaucratic and political corruption perceptions. Our key results are as follows. We find that corruption in Vietnam has discouraged its bilateral export flows. The negative effect of corruption is highly significant in the long-run. In driving Vietnam’s exports, perceptions of corruption in Vietnam are found to be more potent than perceptions in importer countries. We find that the sign effects of corruption in Vietnam or trading partner countries (or importers) are not dependent on whether trading partners are developed or developing. However, we do find that corruption discourages developing countries more than developed countries from importing goods from Vietnam. We confirm the robustness of our results using the control of corruption (COC) measure of corruption extracted from the World Bank Database.