Last week, The Economist published an op-ed entitled “Daft on Graft,” which argued that the enforcement of transnational anti-bribery laws like the U.S. FCPA and U.K. Bribery Act is “becoming ridiculous,” with costs that are “spiraling beyond what is reasonable,” and that we are now witnessing “a descent into investigative madness.”
If I spent all my time responding to poorly-reasoned claptrap that looks like it was written either by a shill for business lobbyists or by someone who didn’t know much about the topic, I wouldn’t have time to do anything else. But when such claptrap appears in a widely-read, well-respected publication like The Economist, I can’t just let it pass. I know, I know—it may be unfair to beat up on a short op-ed, a format that doesn’t lend itself to in-depth analysis or nuance. But still, even by the standards of op-eds in popular periodicals, this is pretty bad. The diagnosis of the problem is shrill, one-sided, and hyperbolic, and the proposed reforms are either already in place, or misguided.
Maybe the best way to approach this is to consider each of the op-ed’s four proposed “reforms” to anti-bribery law enforcement one at a time: Continue reading
GAB | The Global Anticorruption Blog 