ABSTRACT
Historians of the international economy may well identify the half century straddling the year 2000 as one marked by an unusual degree of transformation in the way that political corruption was targeted by political and economic elites. The process commenced in the 1970s with the passage of the first national legislation criminalizing corruption abroad passed in the wake of revelations about bribery by large American companies. The 1980s then witnessed a vast expansion of private investment in the economies of the developing countries, and an unprecedented growth in world trade, accompanied by an explosion of bribery in the awarding of contracts. This was followed in the 1990s by the revival of governmental attempts to find effective ways of combating corruption in international business, an effort which culminated in a treaty in which over thirty of the advanced industrialized countries bound their governments to criminalize foreign bribery through the OECD anti-bribery convention which came into force in the spring of 1999.
