Corruption has played a pivotal role in sustaining appallingly high levels of poverty in many developing countries, particularly in relation to the deficient provision of basic services such as education and health care. It is also a major reason why growth-rate increases in Africa and South Asia have failed to benefit large segments of the population. Corruption drives the overexploitation of natural resources, capturing their value for a small elite—whether timber from Indonesia or coltan from Congo. In the developed world, corrupt funding undermines political systems and lays policy open to heavy financial lobbying.

Laurence Cockcroft argues that corruption has to be seen as the result of the interplay between elite "embedded networks," greed, and organized crime. The growth of corruption has been facilitated by globalization, the integration of new and expanding markets into the world economy, and the rapid expansion of offshore financial facilities, which provide a home to largely unregulated pools of money derived from personal fortunes, organized crime, and pricing malpractice in international trade.

This book shows how the current international interest in corruption follows the fifty years of the Cold War in which efforts to rein in corruption were regarded in international policymaking circles as off the table. Cockcroft describes the change of attitude from the 1990s onward and the initiatives that have been designed to combat corruption over the past twenty years—from individual prosecutors, to governments, to civil society, and to progressive business—and assesses their impact to date. By identifying the main drivers of corruption worldwide and analyzing current efforts to control them, Global Corruption: Money, Power, and Ethics in the Modern World suggests ways in which the problems caused by corruption can be addressed and ultimately prevented.