How do entrepreneurship and corruption relate to innovation and competitiveness?

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.

文献表明，创新与竞争力之间存在着紧密的联系。创新本身并不能保证其影响，使得创业成为将创新转化为新兴企业关键因素。另一方面，创业易受腐败影响，而探讨这两个变量之间关系的研究往往得出模糊或不明确的结论。因此，研究这四个变量相互作用有助于深化对这些关系的理解。本研究旨在验证创业在创新与竞争力关系中的作用，以及腐败对创业是否具有正面或负面的影响。本研究利用来自《全球竞争力报告》和世界银行的企业家数据库项目中的二手数据，生成了一个包含101个国家的样本。分析采用了中介和调节中介技术。结果显示，创业在创新与全球竞争力关系间发挥着中介作用。此外，研究还发现，腐败对创业与竞争力之间的关系具有调节效应，验证了创业在所提模型中的中介效应减弱。出人意料的是，研究发现，国家腐败程度越高，创新通过创业对竞争力的作用越强。这还显示了腐败在开辟新企业和提高国家竞争力方面的作用。研究证明了在传统国际报告中衡量创业水平的重要性，以准确分析国家的发展阶段和民众的福祉。