Person:

Kennedy, David

The interpenetration of global political and economic life has placed questions of ‘political economy’ on the scholarly agenda across the social sciences. The author argues that international law could contribute to understanding and transforming centre–periphery patterns of dynamic inequality in global political economic life. The core elements of both economic and political activity – capital, labour, credit, and money, as well as public or private power and right – are legal institutions. Law is the link binding centres and peripheries to one another and structuring their interaction. It is also the vernacular through which power and wealth justify their exercise and shroud their authority. The author proposes rethinking international law as a terrain for political and economic struggle rather than as a normative or technical substitute for political choice, itself indifferent to natural flows of economic activity.

This report examines the current efforts in Washington, D.C., to amend the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), a law that forbids U.S.-based companies from bribing foreign officials.

Busting Bribery: Sustaining the Global Momentum of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act argues that these proposed amendments would create loopholes and exceptions so as to drastically alter the effectiveness of the FCPA in combating bribery. Additionally, the report finds that these amendments would halt, and potentially reverse, the worldwide trend toward adoption and enforcement of anti-bribery measures, thus compromising the global fight against corruption.

Choices about the meaning and allocation of property rights pose the sorts of policy questions familiar to economists thinking about development policy. If we are seeking economic growth of this or that sort, who should have access to what resources and on what conditions? “Clear and strong property rights” are neither an escape from these questions nor a ready-made answer. Property law is simple one place in which struggles over these questions have been carried out. In this short essay, I review these common, if mistaken, ideas about property rights in the West in light of the Western experience. My objective is to place the strategic choices embedded in any property regime in the foreground and lead one to hesitate before accepting conventional neoliberal wisdom about the importance of “clear” or “strong property rights” for economic development.