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This study applies a quantile cointegration model to investigate if COVID-19 outbreaks in the BRICS (China, India, Russia, Brazil, and South Africa) and the United States have a long-run equilibrium relationship with the dynamics of oil prices. (1) The standard cointegration models are unstable, indicating the possibility of structural breaks and nonlinearity in the relationship between the COVID-19 pandemic and oil prices; (2) The results of the quantile cointegration model suggest the COVID-19 pandemic and oil prices are nearly cointegrated over whole quantiles of the oil price distribution for the United States, Russia, South Africa, and Brazil. However, the long-run equilibrium relationship between the COVID-19 pandemic and oil prices in China is more likely to occur in the lower quantiles of the oil price distribution; (3) For India, the equilibrium link exists only across the two higher quantiles (0.7 and 0.8 quantiles) of the oil price distribution. Finally, our research has significant policy implications for the governments of the world's largest countries that are concerned about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak on oil prices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate whether bilateral exports of goods flowing from Vietnam to its 46 top trading partners are affected by corruption over the period 2000–2014. We capture the effects of corruption of Vietnam and her trade partners, separately using the corruption perception index (CPI) developed by Transparency International. The CPI captures both bureaucratic and political corruption perceptions. Our key results are as follows. We find that corruption in Vietnam has discouraged its bilateral export flows. The negative effect of corruption is highly significant in the long-run. In driving Vietnam's exports, perceptions of corruption in Vietnam are found to be more potent than perceptions in importer countries. We find that the sign effects of corruption in Vietnam or trading partner countries (or importers) are not dependent on whether trading partners are developed or developing. However, we do find that corruption discourages developing countries more than developed countries from importing goods from Vietnam. We confirm the robustness of our results using the control of corruption (COC) measure of corruption extracted from the World Bank Database. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]