Corruption, sustainable development goals performance and modern slavery practices: an international evidence

Purpose This study examines the two key research question; (1) Does country-level corruption give rise to modern slavery (MS) practices and (2) Does sustainable development goals (SDGs) performance of different jurisdictions reduce MS practices? Design/methodology/approach Using a sample of 431 country-year observations (for the period of 2016, 2018 and 2023) from 146 countries, the study test hypotheses applying different econometrics analysis and conducts robustness tests. Findings Our results indicate that country-level corruption practices increase MS practices in different contexts. These results hold when we use alternative measures for MS construct. Our study also reported that MS practices in different jurisdictions are lessened when country-level SDGs performance is higher. Our additional analysis finds that higher country-level debt serves as a channel between corruption and MS practices. Research limitations/implications Practically, the findings of the study have a take-away message for different global actors, in particular, different countries’ governments, national regulators working to abate corruption and slavery issues. For other actors such as the United Nations, the ILO and others, the findings will have practical value for their new policy development and interventions. Originality/value To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first that investigated the role of country-level corruption on MS practice at the country level. Similarly, our attempt towards exploring the impact of country-level sustainable development goals (SDGs) performance on the MS practices is also primary in the literature. Lastly, developing a single framework by integrating different countries’ MS practices with corruption and SDGs performance and providing related empirical evidence with global level data is a new initiative in the accounting and sustainability literature.