Corruption and investment research trends: A bibliometric analysis and future directions

Type of the article: Research ArticleAbstractThe relationship between corruption and investment has attracted growing scholarly attention amid global concerns over governance quality, institutional efficiency, and capital mobility. This paper aims to systematize and critically assess how the relationship between corruption and investment has been explored in academic literature from 2015 to 2024, without limiting either concept to specific forms or levels. A bibliometric analysis was conducted based on 1,535 journal articles indexed in the Scopus database. The study identifies publication trends, dominant keywords, and seven thematic clusters, which reflect major research areas such as institutional quality, foreign direct investment, sustainable development, public policy, and social outcomes. A focused subset of 184 articles, containing both corruption- and investment-related terms in their titles, served as the basis for thematic classification. Three main research approaches are identified: (1) investment-type studies, which overwhelmingly focus on foreign direct investment (FDI), while domestic and informal investments are rarely addressed; (2) causal-explanatory models, which emphasize economic and institutional determinants but largely omit cultural and behavioral variables; and (3) case-based empirical analyses, which are often concentrated on single-country contexts. China is the most frequently studied country, whereas Central Asia, the Middle East, the CIS region, Western Europe, and the Commonwealth are all significantly underrepresented. The findings reveal thematic fragmentation, conceptual bias toward FDI, and persistent geographical imbalance. The study provides a foundation for future research and supports the development of more diversified, context-sensitive approaches to understanding the corruption-investment nexus.