Search

Summary. We explore affiliations of high-level public officials in East and South-East Europe and Central Asia with higher education institutions, which create a risk of undue influence because of conflict of interest.

Summary. Transparency International (TI), an NGO working on corruption worldwide, commonly defines corruption as “the abuse of entrusted power for private gain.” In higher education, however, corruption also encompasses “the lack of academic integrity.” The second definition applies to both public and private institutions, since what they both offer—education—can be construed as a public good. Corruption might be perceived or it might not; in higher education, however, this differentiation is less relevant. Along with the kinds of monetary and non-monetary corruption that can be found anywhere in society, such as corruption in procurement and favouritism in hiring and/or promoting employees, corruption in higher education can implicate the students themselves, thus exerting an influence over the next generation.

Includes discussion of ways in which mainstream reforms do not address institutional/legal/influence-market corruption.

Summary. Two-year research project on Ethics and Integrity in Public Life, conducted by the Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa (ICS-ULisboa), Portugal and financed by Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos (FFMS).The project focus on ethics self-regulatory measures implemented by representative institutions across the EU democracies.

Summary. Asks what attitude and what policies democracies should have concerning individuals who give money away for public purposes; and argues that the aims of mass giving should be the decentralization of power in the production of public goods, such as the arts, education, and science

Summary. A summary of anti-corruption initiatives in Brazil.

Summary. Scholars across the social sciences have long hypothesized that individual contributors often make political contributions on the basis of partisanship or ideology and that the most active donors may be the most ideologically motivated. But drawing from a newly constructed “big” data set called the Longitudinal Elite Contributor Database (LECD), the author shows that past studies have failed to detect several striking patterns in the strategies of individual contributors: (1) a persistent positive association between frequency of giving and bipartisan or “split contributing” and (2) significant declines in the likelihood of bipartisan contributing since the late 1980s. The author shows that donors who give to both parties also target more moderate incumbents of each political party, relative to partisan donors. Taken together, the findings suggest that repeat individual donors are less partisan in their strategies, and vis-à-vis the incumbents to whom they send donations, these repeat contributors are also less ideologically extreme.

Summary. Drug shortages and increasing generic drug prices are associated with low levels of competition. Mergers and acquisitions impact the level of competition. Record merger and acquisition activity was reported for the pharmaceutical sector in 2014/15, yet information on mergers and acquisitions in the generic drug sector are absent from the literature. This information is necessary to understand if and how such mergers and acquisitions can be a factor in drug shortages and increasing prices. METHODS: Data on completed merger and acquisition deals that had a generic drug company being taken over (i.e. 'target') were extracted from Bloomberg Finance L.P. The number and announced value of deals are presented globally, for the United States, and globally excluding the United States annually from 1995 to 2016 in United States dollars. RESULTS: Generic drug companies comprised 9.3% of the value of all deals with pharmaceutical targets occurring from 1995 to 2016. Globally, in 1995 there were no deals, in 2014 there were 22 deals worth $1.86 billion, in 2015 there were 34 deals totalling $33.56 billion, and in 2016 there were 42 deals worth in excess of $44 billion. This substantial increase was partially attributed to Teva's 2016 acquisition of Allergan's generic drug business. The surge in mergers and acquisitions for 2015/16 was driven by deals in the United States, where they represented 89.7% of the dollar value of deals in those years. CONCLUSIONS: The recent blitz in mergers and acquisitions signals that the generic drug industry is undergoing a transformation, especially in the United States. This restructuring can negatively affect the level of competition that might impact prices and shortages for some products, emphasizing the importance of updating regulations and procurement policies.

Summary. Automakers are using the bankruptcy process to ensure their responsibility is limited.

Summary. Discusses developments in the issue of whether to regulate the practice of double-booking surgeons to maximize revenue.

Summary. The state is responsible for maintaining law and order in society and protecting the people. Sometimes it fails to fulfill these responsibilities; in other cases, it actively harms people. There have been many instances of political corruption and state crime throughout history, with impacts that range from economic damage to physical injury to death—sometimes on a massive scale (e.g., economic recession, pollution/poisoning, genocide). The challenge for criminologists, however, is that defining political corruption and state crime can be thorny, as can identifying their perpetrators—who can often be collectives of individuals such as organizations and governments—and their victims. In turn, pinpointing appropriate avenues of controlling these crimes can be difficult. These challenges are exacerbated by power issues and the associated reality that the state is in a position to write or change laws and, in essence, regulate itself. One possible solution is to define political corruption and state crime—as well as their perpetrators and victims—as broadly as possible to include a variety of scenarios that may or may not exhibit violations of criminal law. Likewise, a resolution to the issue of social control would be to move beyond strictly institutional mechanisms of control. Criminological research should further elucidate these issues; it should also, however, move beyond conceptual dilemmas toward (a) better understanding the processes underlying political corruption/state crime and (b) illustrating the broader ramifications of these crimes.

Summary. This article aims to the logical development of a practical and applicable analysis model of argumentative transparency, specifically for the study of public policies. To this end, we draw upon a “political concept of transparency” which redefines pragmatic logic operations in contexts of trust and cooperation between actors. The model combines a principal-agent framework, non-linear assumptions of production of information, and conversational maxims of use of language. This results in an analysis that is focused on the actors’ capacity and their relation. The model also finds a necessary link between active and passive transparency processes, where the building of trust arising from transparency is directly associated with the reduction of control costs. In addition, this article intends to be an applied model, with visual tools related to transparent decision-making processes, protocols for marking up transparency in texts and, finally, an empirical analysis of transparency in the argument of specific public policies. The combination of multiple frameworks and the deduction of a logical model presents an original work for the study of public policies.