Many international firms and local companies are operating in markets that are exposed to corruption. Corruption increases the cost of doing business and has harmful consequences on the society. Multinational corporations publish compliance and anti-corruption declaration on their home pages, where they claim they resist demands for bribes. Firms can go beyond legal compliance and corporations can take a more active role in the prevention of corruption.

Companies of all sizes increasingly recognize corruption as a risk reducing competitive advantage by increasing costs and damaging to sustainable growth. For Transparency International, anti-corruption and corporate transparency policies are essential to tackle the roots of corruption in corporations.

This paper suggests that the effectiveness of current anticorruption policy suffers from a focus on the scale of the corruption problem instead of type of corruption that is to be fought. I make a distinction between need and greed corruption. Contrary to the most commonly used distinctions this distinction focuses on the basic motivation for paying a bribe, and whether the bribe is used to gain services that citizens are legally entitled to or not.

Collective action refers to actions undertaken by individuals and/or groups towards a collective purpose or goal. Attempting to foment collective action as an anti-corruption strategy is a tactic that is enjoying growing support. However, experience suggests that collective action is difficult to foster, and evidence of success is scarce. 

This is the third and final publication of Global Compact Network India's Collective Action Project. In it, UNGC companies and business entities share practical experiences as to how they have been investing in getting their processes and procedures in order, so that businesses could be free of corruption, ensuring transparency in their supply chains and procurement mechanism.

Transparency in the extractives sector is widely seen as a key tool for improving accountability and deterring corruption. Yet for those very reasons, it is a puzzle that so many governments in corruption-prone countries have voluntarily signed up to greater scrutiny in this area, by joining the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI).

Collective action initiatives in which governments and companies make anti-corruption commitments have proliferated in recent years.

This apparently prosocial behavior defies the logic of collective action and, given that bribery often goes undetected and unpunished, is not easily explained by principal-agent theory. Club theory suggests that the answer lies in the institutional design of anti-corruption clubs: collective action can work as long as membership has high entry costs, members receive selective benefits, and compliance is adequately policed.

This report aims to provide an overview of business integrity and anti-bribery legislation, policies and practices applicable to state-owned enterprises (SOEs) operating across the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region.

Companies today, in particular banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions, increasingly operate their businesses in a group structure. These financial groups have a growing presence in markets worldwide and the economy as a whole. To do business effectively and efficiently in group structures, corporate groups should be managed in a holistic and integrated manner, in much the same way as an enterprise.

This paper sets out lessons from a mixed-methods study that identified and explored ‘positive outlier’ cases of bribery reduction in challenging governance environments. It discusses the two cases the research examined in depth: