1. This
chapter explores the features of modern developing country markets, using some
examples from South Africa, to argue that traditional definitions of
private-sector corruption are simply narrowly focused to capture the range of
economic activities that are of widespread contemporary concern to citizens.
(pp.225)
2. In
short, to reduce private-sector corruption requires work to redefine the scope
and applicability of the concept itself, in order to better align what the
general population view as immoral with what is formally illegal. (pp.225)
3. These
have been made particularly complex in the past thirty years or so by
neo-liberal economic policies and greater internationalisation and
financialisation of developing-country economies. This context has eroded a
clear divide between the public and private sector, creating many spaces in
which the newer forms of corporate malpractice have grown. (pp.225)
4. In this
chapter, the argument will be developed using illustrative examples from
southern Africa, where development finance institutions and private-equity
firms jointly co-invest from tax havens and by so doing maintain a key
strategic role in overall economic development. (pp.225)
5.
Anti-corruption initiatives are
designed as if private-sector corruption only happens at the boundary of the
firm when it interacts with the public sector, when an official demands a
bribe. (pp.226)
6.
Thus, the private sector, in
contrast to the guilt of public officials, has been systematically portrayed as
a victim of bad governance and the (inevitably) corrupt African state, forced
into bribery, ‘dash money’ or facilitation payments as a consequence of systems
that resist reform. (pp.226)
7. A new definition of private-sector corruption requires a
normative foundation, and because this opens up the problem of relativity, that
is ‘whose morality?’, for the purposes of this paper, I elect democratic
mediating values as that foundation, which would include transparency,
accountability and responsiveness to the public. (pp.237)
By identifying a gap through which the current narrow,
legalistic framework of political corruption can be replaced by a broader,
normative one, Sarah Bracking widens the scope of anti-corruption measures
without getting entangled in cultural relativist debates.
Sarah Bracking,
“Corruption and Development: The Mutable Edges of Morality in Modern Markets,”
in Routledge Handbook of Political Corruption,
ed. Paul M. Heywood (New York: Routledge, 2015), 225-241
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