CORE-LESS : Assessing the nature and impact of transnational corruption through the lens of Swiss businesses

Corruption is considered one of the main factors impeding sustainable development and corporate sustainability. Thereby, corruption is of an increasingly international nature, operating across borders and legal frameworks. Responding effectively to such ‘transnational corruption’ frequently poses a challenge. Evaluations of anti-corruption policies underline the high degree of policy failure encountered in most jurisdictions notably due to the lack of fine-grained, comparable, reliable data on actual corruption cases. Besides the need to obtain information on actual experiences of corruption, current scholarship has also highlighted the importance of collecting empirical context-specific data disaggregated by populations and sectors. 

The project “Assessing the nature and impact of transnational corruption through the lens of Swiss businesses”, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, aims to assess the risks of corruption of Swiss businesses while interacting with public and private institutions abroad, identify the determinants of these risks, evaluate the impact of international anti-corruption provisions, and the effectiveness of compliance programs. This will be achieved by using a three-step methodology, beginning with a sample survey of Swiss companies operating abroad and qualitative interviews with Swiss business representatives, and then leading to semi-structured interviews with representatives of Swiss embassies.

Advisory Board

• Olivier Bovet - State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO)
• Federica De Rossa - Ordinary Judge of the Swiss Federal Court and Università della Svizzera italiana (USI)
• Karl Hofstetter - Universität Zürich (UZH)
• Mark Livschitz - Mark Livschitz AG
• Paolo Morel - PM Consulenze SA
• Simone Nadelhofer - Lalive - International law firm
• Clara Poglia - White Collar Crime and Investigations Group and Litigation Department Schellenberg Wittmer
• Anne Van Heerden - KPMG Switzerland
• Christoph Wild - Swiss Association of Manufacturers and Traders in Precious Metals - ASFCMP