Current factory inspections programs are flawed, with deliberate mis-labelling and corruption in factories in China, resulting in shoddy and unsafe products on shelves of retailers like WalMart, says a New York Times investigation story. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/02/business/global/superficial-visits-and-trickery-undermine-foreign-factory-inspections.html?pagewanted=all
Some observers concede that the Bangladesh government and local manufacturers have been lax on safety issues, but note the countervailing ethical conundrum: that boycotts or cutting of ties with the impoverished nation will only move the problem somewhere else and further drive Bangladesh into wrenching poverty. http://www.globalethics.org/newsline/2013/05/06/clothing-retailers/
According to Psych Central, April 25, 2013, new research finds that morals and conscience play a role in how we view money. In particular, researchers discover that when people perceive money as morally tainted, they also view it as having less value and purchasing power since it was obtained by immoral means. This finding challenges
Slammed in 2011 by Transparency International (TI) for having “little or no enforcement,” Canada’s Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) has stepped up its enforcement of the country’s anti-bribery laws, with 35 active investigations and several successful prosecutions now under their belt. Canadian businesses are taking note. In the opinion of CS Newsflash (April 12), peer
“Our leaders need to be held accountable, says journalist Heather Brooke. And she should know: Brooke uncovered the British Parliamentary financial expenses that led to a major political scandal in 2009. She urges us to ask our leaders questions through platforms like Freedom of Information requests — and to finally get some answers.”
According to the Globe and Mail,”The company’s status makes the murky affair they reported this week a black eye for Canadian business. Worse, the questions it raises – about whether money made it to the hands of a foreign official – underlines a weakness. Canada has a poor reputation for tackling bribery.”
“Both Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Industry Minister Christian Paradis have chosen to characterize the finding that the cabinet minister broke conflict of interest rules as a teaching moment”which according to the journalist who wrote this article“…raises the question of whether a federal cabinet minister should be expected to understand ethical issues such as conflict
In a Globe and Mail article today the journalists write”The RCMP have implicated a Canadian tech executive in an alleged bribery and bid-rigging scheme that involves prominent public figures in India at a time when outrage over corruption has paralyzed its Parliament. “
“The study of corruption has one glaring problem: the difficulty obtaining data upon which to base conclusions. Shawn A. Cole and Anh Tran add to the research literature of corruption by analyzing actual internal records of firms that paid bribes in an Asian developing country. The work, they report, provides “new estimates of corruption and
This article examines what determines oil and gas companies’ transparency in reporting on business activities in host countries where they operate. It founnd that the index of transparency across host countries is lower the more corrupt the host country, the higher the number of nationalizations in that host country in the past, and the fewer