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 (UNGC 2015). 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 (Janciscs 2019; Villeneuve et al. 2019, 2020). 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 (Andersson 2016; Olken 2009; Sequeira 2012). Through the case of Swiss businesses operating abroad, the proposed study will gather empirical data on the risks of corruption during businesses’ interactions with public and private institutions abroad, the determinants of these risks, the impact on businesses’ decisions and reputation, anti-corruption strategies and their effectiveness.