The Corruption Cure Rotberg, Robert I
2017, 2017., 20170424, 2017-05-22
eBook
Why leadership is key to ending political and corporate corruption globally
Corruption corrodes all facets of the world's political and corporate life, yet until now there was no one book that ...explained how best to battle it.The Corruption Cureprovides many of the required solutions and ranges widely across continents and diverse cultures-putting some thirty-five countries under an anticorruption microscope-to show exactly how to beat back the forces of sleaze and graft.
Robert Rotberg defines corruption theoretically and practically in its many forms, describes the available legal remedies, and examines how we know and measure corruption's presence. He looks at successful and unsuccessful attempts to employ anticorruption investigative commissions to combat political theft and venal behavior. He explores how the globe's least corrupt nations reached that exceptional goal. Another chapter discusses the role of civil society in limiting corruption. Expressed political will through determined leadership is a key factor in winning all of these battles. Rotberg analyzes the best-performing noncorrupt states to show how consummate leadership made a telling difference. He demonstrates precisely how determined leaders changed their wildly corrupt countries into paragons of virtue, and how leadership is making a significant difference in stimulating political anticorruption movements in places like India, Croatia, Honduras, and Lebanon. Rotberg looks at corporate corruption and how it can be checked, and also offers an innovative fourteen-step plan for nations that are ready to end corruption.
Curing rampant corruption globally requires strengthened political leadership and the willingness to remake national political cultures. Tougher laws and better prosecutions are not enough. This book enables us to rethink the problem completely-and solve it once and for all.
InSpoils of Truce, Reinoud Leenders documents the extensive corruption that accompanied the reconstruction of Lebanon after the end of a decade and a half of civil war. With the signing of the Ta'if ...peace accord in 1989, the rebuilding of the country's shattered physical infrastructure and the establishment of a functioning state apparatus became critical demands. Despite the urgent needs of its citizens, however, graft was rampant. Leenders describes the extent and nature of this corruption in key sectors of the Lebanese economy and government, including transportation, health care, energy, natural resources, construction, and social assistance programs.
Exploring in detail how corruption implicated senior policymakers and high-ranking public servants, Leenders offers a clear-eyed perspective on state institutions in the developing world. He also addresses the overriding role of the Syrian leadership's interests in Lebanon and in particular its manipulation of the country's internal differences. His qualitative and disaggregated approach to dissecting the politics of creating and reshaping state institutions complements the more typical quantitative methods used in the study of corruption. More broadly,Spoils of Trucewill be uncomfortable reading for those who insist that power-sharing strategies in conflict management and resolution provide some sort of panacea for divided societies hoping to recover from armed conflict.
This book presents new socio-legal perspectives and insights on the social life of corruption and anticorruption in authoritarian regimes. This book takes up the case of Uzbekistan—an authoritarian ...regime in Central Asia and one of the most corrupt countries in the world according to Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index—and examines the corruption that developed in a tightly closed authoritarian regime permeated by a large-scale shadow economy, a weak rule of law, and a collectivist legal culture. Building on socio-legal frameworks of legal compliance, living law and legal pluralism, the central argument of the book is that the roles, meanings, and logics of corruption are fluid, and depend on a myriad of structural variables, and contextual and situational factors. This book will be of value to researchers, academics, and students in the fields of sociology of law, legal anthropology, and Central Asian studies, especially those with an interest in the intersection of law, society, and corruption in authoritarian regime contexts.
Meet the economic gangster. He's the United Nations diplomat who double-parks his Mercedes on New York City streets at rush hour because the cops can't touch him—he has diplomatic immunity. He's the ...Chinese smuggler who dodges tariffs by magically transforming frozen chickens into frozen turkeys. The dictator, the warlord, the unscrupulous bureaucrat who bilks the developing world of billions in aid. The calculating crook who views stealing and murder as just another part of his business strategy. And, in the wrong set of circumstances, he might just be you. In Economic Gangsters, Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel take readers into the secretive, chaotic, and brutal worlds inhabited by these lawless and violent thugs. Join these two sleuthing economists as they follow the foreign aid money trail into the grasping hands of corrupt governments and shady underworld characters. Spend time with ingenious black marketeers as they game the international system. Follow the steep rise and fall of stock prices of companies with unseemly connections to Indonesia's former dictator. See for yourself what rainfall has to do with witch killings in Tanzania—and more.
Communism, or as Ken Jowitt prefers, Leninism, has attracted,
repelled, mystified, and terrified millions for nearly a century.
In his brilliant, timely, and controversial study, New World
Disorder , ...Jowitt identifies and interprets the extraordinary
character of Leninist regimes, their political corruption,
extinction, and highly unsettling legacy. Earlier attempts to grasp
the essence of Leninism have treated the Soviet experience as
either a variant of or alien to Western history, an approach that
robs Leninism of much of its intriguing novelty. Jowitt instead
takes a "polytheist" approach, Weberian in tenor and terms,
comparing the Leninist to the liberal experience in the West,
rather than assimilating it or alienating it. Approaching the
Leninist phenomenon in these terms and spirit emphasizes how
powerful the imperatives set by the West for the rest of the world
are as sources of emulation, assimilation, rejection, and
adaptation; how unyielding premodern forms of identification,
organization, and action are; how novel, powerful, and dangerous
charisma as a mode of organized indentity and action can be. The
progression from essay to essay is lucid and coherent. The first
six essays reject the fundamental assumptions about social change
that inform the work of modernization theorists. Written between
1974 and 1990, they are, we know now, startingly prescient. The
last three essays, written in early 1991, are the most
controversial: they will be called alarmist, pessimistic,
apocalyptic. They challenge the complacent, optimistic, and
self-serving belief that the world is being decisively shaped in
the image of the West-that the end of history is at hand.
Corruption has been a feature of public institutions for centuries yet only relatively recently has it been made the subject of sustained scientific analysis. Lambsdorff shows how insights from ...institutional economics can be used to develop a better understanding of why corruption occurs and the best policies to combat it. He argues that rather than being deterred by penalties, corrupt actors are more influenced by other factors such as the opportunism of their criminal counterparts and the danger of acquiring an unreliable reputation. This suggests a novel strategy for fighting corruption similar to the invisible hand that governs competitive markets. This strategy - the 'invisible foot' - shows that the unreliability of corrupt counterparts induces honesty and good governance even in the absence of good intentions. Combining theoretical research with state-of-the-art empirical investigations, this book will be an invaluable resource for researchers and policy-makers concerned with anti-corruption reform.
Multi-component block copolymer nanohybrids consisting of Fe.sub.3O.sub.4 nanoparticles and poly(acryloyloxyethyloxyl 1-mercaptohemisuccinate) and poly(methacrylic acid) (PMAA) blocks were ...synthesized via the surface-initiated atom transfer radical polymerization, followed by the esterification with d,l-mercaptosuccinic acid. The block copolymer nanohybrids were coordinated with Au nanoparticles (Au NPs) through pendent thiol groups to form Au NPs coordinated Fe.sub.3O.sub.4 graft block copolymer nanohybrids. Fluorescent spectrometry, TEM and SEM findings indicated that these block copolymer nanohybrids could self-assembled and form globular core-shell nanomicelles, and their critical micelle concentrations decreased with the decrease in the length of PMAA chains and the incorporation of Au NPs. Zeta potential measurements signified that the copolymer nanohybrids possessed significantly high stability. DLS results indicated that hydrodynamic diameters of the copolymer nanohybrids distributed within the scope of 85-155 nm, hinging on the length of the graft chains and the complexation of Au NPs. The hybrid block copolymer nanomicelles exhibited pH, electrochemical and magnetic responsiveness, with pH transition points at 5.3-5.9. The incorporation and the loading percentage of Au NPs improved the reversibility of the electrochemical response and plasmon resonance. The block copolymer nanohybrids were superparamagnetic and were expected to broaden their applications by virtue of the multi-component combination and the resulting multifunctionality.
An important question for the health and longevity of democratic governance is how institutions may be fashioned to prevent electoral victors from drawing on the resources of the state to perpetuate ...themselves in power. This book addresses the issue by examining how the structure of electoral institutions - the rules of democratic contestation that determine the manner in which citizens choose their representatives - affects political corruption, defined as the abuse of state power or resources for campaign finance or party-building purposes. To this end, the book develops a novel theoretical framework that examines electoral institutions as a potential vehicle for political parties to exploit the state as a source of political finance. Hypotheses derived from this framework are assessed using an unprecedented public employees' survey conducted by the author in Bolivia, Brazil and Chile.
