Abstract
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. Furthermore, particular emphasis is given on how discussions on innovation can contribute to advancing knowledge for solutions to complex problems and issues, such as corruption.
Keywords Entrepreneurship · Innovation · Global Competitiveness · Corruption