How Should Responsibility for Regulation Be Allocated?

The OECD paradigm’s expansive approach to jurisdiction has advantages in terms of effectiveness and legitimacy, but, by inviting multiple enforcement agencies to intervene in individual cases, it creates space for disagreement, conflict, and redundancy. Previous chapters have shown that reasonable people can disagree about which conduct or actors to target and what sanctions to impose. There also is a risk that collective action problems will compromise effectiveness or efficiency. Some of these dangers can be avoided by assigning enforcement authority to an international organization such as a multilateral development bank, or even a new international anti-corruption agency, but the problems of legitimacy are likely to remain. When hard cases arise, the views of people who will be most greatly affected by the decision, namely, the inhabitants of the country governed by corrupt officials, ought to be given significant weight.