All in the Family : State Capture in Tunisia

Rijkers, Bob ; Freund, Caroline ; Nucifora, Antonio

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: ACCOUNTING;    AFFILIATED ORGANIZATIONS;    AIR;    AIR TRANSPORT;    AIRLINE INDUSTRY;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-6810
RP-ID  :  WPS6810

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

This paper examines the relationshipbetween regulation and the business interests of PresidentBen Ali and his family, using firm-level data from Tunisiafor 1994-2010. Data on investment regulations are mergedwith balance sheet and firm-level census data in which 220firms owned by the Ben Ali family are identified. Theseconnected firms outperform their competitors in terms ofemployment, output, market share, profits, and growth andsectors in which they are active are disproportionatelysubject to authorization requirements and restriction onforeign direct investment. Consistent with theories ofcapture, performance differences between connected firms andtheir peers are significantly larger in highly regulatedsectors. In addition, the introduction of new foreign directinvestment restrictions and authorization requirements innarrowly defined five-digit sectors is correlated with thepresence of connected firms and with their startup,suggesting that regulation is endogenous to state capture.The evidence implies that Tunisia's industrial policywas used as a vehicle for rent creation for the presidentand his family.