From the ever reliable and informative Transparency International comes news that the EU is pushing the WTO to get into the anti-corruption business:
The European Union wants to expand the agenda of the World Trade Organisation to include anti-corruption measures, Pascal Lamy, the EU's trade commissioner, said yesterday.
In Berlin, Mr Lamy said the Commission would comment on the EU's stance on business and trade-related corruption when WTO members reviewed its trade policies this year.
He hoped the move, aimed at prompting other WTO members to do likewise, would be a first step towards building a "broad coalition of interests" in support of an "explicit anti-corruption agenda in the WTO".
"If we get others to follow, we will have gone a long way towards making the fight against corruption an explicit rather than an implicit WTO objective" he said. (via Financial Times)
We really need to free ourselves from the riptides of corruption and crony capitalism. To do this, you can't just try to swim against the current. You have to lateralize and move beyond the current, and gain a fresh perspective courtesy of full transparency and accountability.
