The United Nations Convention Against Corruption and its Impact on International Companies

Corruption is a serious economic, social, political, and moral blight, especially in many emerging countries. It is a problem that affects companies in particular, especially in international commerce, finance, and technology transfer. And it is becoming an international phenomenon in scope, substance, and consequences. That is why, in recent years, there has been a proliferation of international efforts to tackle the problem of corruption. One such international cooperative initiative is the United Nations Convention against Corruption, signed in 2003, which came into force in December 2005. This is the first truly global instrument to prevent and combat corruption, built on a broad international consensus. The purpose of this article is to explain the origin and content of the Convention, what it adds to existing international instruments for combating corruption, and its strengths and weaknesses, mainly from the point of view of companies.     

Rethinking John R. Commons’s Theory of Collective Action: The Viewpoint of Regulation and Convention

This article examines the theoretical connection between John R. Commons, régulation theory, and convention theory. In institutional economics (Commons 1934), by applying the idea of “multiple causation,” Commons approached macro-dynamics based on the expansion of some key concepts and studies on income distribution and demand growth. It is a prototype of the growth analysis based on the cumulative causation model, with the various forms of coordination later formulated by régulation theory. The two-layered coordination in convention theory attempted to explicitly explain the individuals’ reflexive capacities to change preference endogenously and to evaluate collective and social value, which were implicitly assumed in Commons’s term “intellect.”