Abstract:

Globalization and informatization have brought a paradigm shift worldwide in

political, economic, social and cultural environment. The worldwide growth in business and increase in incomes have brought a lot of changes in the area of governance and it is observed that good corporate governance armed with effective checks and balances improves transparency in business management, lowers capital costs, enhances corporate value, thereby strengthening business competitiveness and economic growth. Therefore, the issue of transparency in economic and business decisions has become one of the most talked about topics in economics and finance and among businessmen and policy makers and resultantly they have started investigating the relationship between economic growth, corruption, ethics and transparency. This study is an attempt to analyze the trade off between economic growth measured by GDP per capita and transparency index and the focus of the paper is to analyze whether the economic growth in emerging economies is accompanied by transparent and ethical practices. This is done through construction of growth- transparency matrix in which the countries are divided into 16 quadrants based upon their GDP and Transparency score. The results show that there is a positive relationship i.e. the countries that score well on the GDP front also have a good transparency level and those countries which have less GDP have low level of transparency. In case of emerging economies, especially BRICS nations, the performance has not been satisfactory in terms of transparency and they lie in lower quadrants which suggest that economic growth in these countries is unsustainable and non transparent. Therefore, in order to catch up with the developed nations, the governments in these countries will have to maintain strict compliance of regulations because the economic system based on transparent business management and fair competition works to enhance corporate value, efficiency in resource allocation and increase in growth potential of the economy.