Fighting Corruption through Business Practice: Still 'Running Behind'? A Review and Assessment

Abstract

A large amount of literature on corruption follows a “one-sided” approach that focuses on the drivers and effects from a dominant point of view, whether from the supply-side (businesses) or the demand-side (government officials). This paper attempts to take a different approach by synthesizing the two above-mentioned approaches into a contingency model and offering a categorization of corruption between public and private sectors through the concept of corruption government-business (CGB). Several conceptual and methodological problems afflict the systematic investigation of corruption and the empirical results taken as a whole are sometimes inconsistent. On the demand-side a prevalent strand of contributions calls for anti-corruption strategies aimed at the reduction of benefits and costs under the control of public agents, as well as at the restriction of their discretion. On the supply-side it is found that corporate governance and reporting standards are often referred to as tools to foster integrity and transparency in business practices. Therefore, aiming to offer a “hands-on” assessment of such practices, the final part of the paper scrutinizes the disclosure of anti-corruption and transparency measures of the world’s largest publicly listed multinational companies. It is acknowledged that more emphasis should be put on the public disclosure of anti-corruption programmes, the levels of organizational transparency and those of country-by-country reporting.