Search

As part of an overall focus on governance in international political economy, the corruption issue has catapulted from the margins of academic and policy discourse on international affairs to a position as one of the central problems facing transition economies and the developing world today. But the irreducibly normative character of anti-corruption discourse is in tension with the predominantly rationalist, technical and instrumental justifications for open markets which have come to dominate the academic and institutional discourse on international political economy. The omissions and oversights of neo-liberal discourse lead analysts to evade and obscure, rather than directly engage, core problems of politics and ethics; this may have practical consequences for anti-corruption efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If ethics are often treated as marginal to global politics, then they are doubly excluded from analyses of global economic governance: here, the traditional division between the domestic as the site of politics and the international as a realm of amoral relations is compounded by a second division between politics and economics. Institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank rely on such distinctions when their leaders insist on the essential neutrality of their efforts to manage global economic affairs. Although political economists have challenged these institutions? claims to political neutrality, they have rarely questioned their appeals to ethical neutrality. Yet moral assumptions and moral arguments do in fact play a crucial role in economic governance. The paper challenges the sustainability of the double denial of ethics in economic governance, pointing to the normative assumptions underpinning the very separation between the international and the domestic and politics and economics. The role of moral assumptions in economic governance, from the most basic premises of economic theory to more complex efforts to sustain legitimacy for economic governance strategies, is examined. The conclusion demonstrates the practical role of moral arguments in economic governance both historically and today. Although ethics have always played a central role in economic governance, we are witnessing an important shift today as international economic institutions have begun to move away from their traditional appeal to technical neutrality and become increasingly explicit in their use of moral arguments. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]