Cross-border Corruption: Points of Vulnerability and Challenges for Reform

The same globalisation of markets and developmental inequalities that have helped draw renewed attention to problems of corruption in recent years also confront us with the dilemma of cross-border corruption. Crossborder corruption involving international interests, actors, capital and economic processes (both licit and illicit) is a potentially serious problem in affluent and developing countries alike, and raises important questions for both analysts and would-be reformers. Monitoring, oversight and the gathering of reliable data are difficult enough with respect to legitimate international trade. For cases of domestic corruption, such challenges are even greater. But cross-border corruption occurs within and among many jurisdictions, each of which may experience only a part of a much more complicated process. A world in which capital, people, information and enterprises move freely and rapidly from place to place offers new development opportunities of many sorts, but also makes accountability more difficult: because the agents of cross-border corruption are capable of doing business almost everywhere, it is difficult to hold them accountable anywhere. Even when domestic governments or international organisations decide to confront the problem, the result can be a mismatch: governments of developing states, and international organisations with their finite resources and limited mandates, may be no match politically or economically for powerful interests, often working in secret, that hold the leverage underlying cross-border corruption.