Abstract
Corruption is increasingly placed on top of the agenda of national governments and supra national institutions, such as the OECD, UN or the World Bank. A necessary condition for promoting sustainable economic growth is the pre-existence of a stable political system which is able to control corruption. Corruption, however, is a very complex issue, associated with institutional and cultural specificities, personality traits related to individualistic values, and criminal personalities. In this book the social, political and economic realities that prevail in particular settings are viewed from an interdisciplinary, multidimensional, and a multi country perspective. This book is divided into three parts. The first part presents a comprehensive, theoretical and empirical framework of corruption with an overview of literature on economic growth and corruption. Part two, encompasses the in-depth analysis of several countries, ranging from middle corrupted contexts like Portugal, to highly corrupted countries including Serbia, Russia, Thailand and China- the latter viewed from the perspective of firms from a very low corruption country such as Finland. The final part explores the prevention and control of corruption, looking at the public sector in Thailand and fighting corruption with different strategies. This volume is of the interest of those who study international economics, development economics or organised crime.

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The direct relationship between national cultural practice and entrepreneurship activities is analyzed in this chapter, based on the analysis of 44 countries. Datasets from 2012 and 2013 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) report are used to characterize three types of entrepreneurship: Early-Stage entrepreneurial activity (TEA); Necessity-Driven entrepreneurship (NDE) and Opportunity-Driven (ODE) entrepreneurship. Data sets on national cultural values are used to analyze five dimensions of Hofstede's work on cultural values (power distance, individualism/collectivism, masculinity/femininity, long/short term orientation, and uncertainty avoidance). For that, the authors use the Values Survey Module 2013, which has been adapted from Hofstede's previous work from 2010 and 2008. The main conclusion is that the three types of entrepreneurship analyzed in this chapter are differently explained by the cultural and expanded models. If the country of origin and the type of economy are useful to explain TEA, they are of no added value to explain Necessity-Driven or opportunity-driven entrepreneurship.

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The use of cooperative diversity techniques and network coding concepts are promising solutions to improve the communication reliability in industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). In this paper, we propose the NetCoDer scheme to address this problem, whose design is based in these concepts. The effectiveness of the NetCoDer scheme is evaluated through both an experimental setup with real WSN nodes and a simulation assessment, comparing its performance against state-of-the-art TDMA-based retransmission techniques.

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