Shadow Economy, Corruption and Economic Growth: An Analysis of BRICS Countries

The paper examines the impact of shadow economy and corruption, along with public expenditure, trade openness, foreign direct investment (FDI), inflation, and tax revenue on the economic growth of the BRICS countries. Data were collected from the World Bank, Transparency International, and Heritage Foundation over the 1991–2017 period. The Bayesian linear regression method is used to examine whether shadow economy, corruption and other indicators affect the economic growth of countries studied. This paper applies the normal prior suggested by Lemoine (2019) while the posterior distribution is simulated using Monte Carlo Markov Chain (MCMC) technique through the Gibbs sampling algorithm. The results indicate that public expenditure and trade openness can enhance the BRICS countries’ economic growth, with the positive impact probability of 75.69% and 67.11%, respectively. Also, FDI, inflation, and tax revenue positively affect this growth, though the probability of positive effect is ambiguous, ranging from 51.13% to 56.36%. Further, the research’s major finding is that shadow economy and control of corruption have a positive effect on the economic growth of the BRICS countries. Nevertheless, the posterior probabilities of these two factors are 62.23% and 65.25%, respectively. This result suggests that their positive effect probability is not high.