Having in mind the main debate “grease the wheels” vs. “sand the wheels”, the main objective of this study is to find the way in which corruption and shadow economy influence economic and sustainable development. A large cross-country database of 185 countries is used for the 2005–2015 time period. We find that corruption and shadow economy are poverty-driven diseases and they highly characterize low-income countries. Thus, the higher levels of corruption and shadow economy are correlated with low levels of economic and sustainable development. Then, the main contribution of this work consists of finding general and empirical evidence for the destructive role held by the corruption and shadow economy phenomena upon the economic and sustainable development of states. However, we also find some evidence that corruption can be also seen as a way to circumvent the law in order to achieve higher economic benefits and thereby to increase economic development. In addition, we find that economic and sustainable development in high-income countries is more strongly and negatively affected by the phenomena of corruption and shadow economy than in the case of low-income countries. Our research may have political implications for the government institutions that need to adopt the best-required policies, in order to boost economic and sustainable development. For low-income countries, we find some evidence for positive effects of corruption and shadow economy upon economic and sustainable development and the immediate practical implications are not to encourage but to effectively and strongly fight against these destructive phenomena and to find the proper channels to increase the institutional quality and to adopt the appropriate regulatory policies.

Sustainable development has gained the attention of researchers worldwide and is becoming an important topic, especially in relation to corporate governance principles. This study investigates the influence of corporate governance on sustainable development in a sample of 185 countries over 2005–2020 using a panel linear regression model. Separate analyses are also conducted on subsamples of high- and low-income countries. Our findings highlight the positive influence of corporate governance, as measured by board efficacy, the strength of audits and reports, and digitalisation, on sustainable development, as measured by the Human Development Index, Human Capital Index, and Environmental Performance Index. Moreover, we find a higher positive and marginal effect of the influence of corporate governance on sustainable development for low-income countries than for high-income countries. The robustness checks performed using variables related to the happiness index, women in top management positions, and technology adoption verify our results. Our findings are important for managers and policymakers to consolidate sustainable development through the incentive brought about by high-quality corporate governance.

In this paper we analyze the influence of technology on the level of the economic and financial crime, using data for 185 countries over the 2012–2015 time period and controlling for many important variables. First, we find that on average, the size of the economic and financial crime in low income countries is about double compared to that of high income countries, while their Research and development expenditure (as % of GDP) are about four times lower than in high income countries. We find clear evidence that increased technology reduces the size of the economic and financial crime. In addition, we find that Research and development expenditure (% of GDP) matter more in reducing the economic and financial crime in low income countries than they do in high income countries. Our main findings are generally stable after conducting some robustness checks. From a policy perspective, our study may prove to be of great use to decision makers of the states, to government and non-governmental enterprises and to potential investors within different markets.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought many changes into people’s lives. Fear, job insecurity, changes in their financial stability, concerns about their future lives have changed the entire lives of people and have affected the cognitive well-being of individuals. The purpose of the present analysis is to measure how the COVID-19 pandemic, along with financial factors, has affected the perceived level of well-being of individuals. We are also interested whether there are differences between life before COVID-19, life now with COVID-19, and life after the COVID-19 pandemic, in terms of future expectations. To address this objective, we performed an ANOVA approach and a GLM estimate on repeated measures for a large sample (1572 respondents) from 43 worldwide countries, during the period May 2020 and July 2021. Our results show that financial factors reflected by both the size of income and changes in personal or family income affect the levels of happiness. Robustness checks using stress as an alternative estimator for happiness have consolidated our results. Additionally, we find that well-being during COVID-19 compared to the previous period decreased, while in future, people expect to be happier, but not more than in the past when they did not know about the existence of this virus. This is one of the first studies to investigate the relationship between happiness and income before, during, and after COVID-19. These findings are important for policymakers to improve the conditions of living in the areas of health and financial stability.