Corruption in Multinational Enterprises' (MNEs') codes of conduct and private sector vulnerabilities

Belonging to the wider family of criminal opportunity approaches, sector vulnerability studies (Hughes, 1998) delve into the opportunities that formal economies provide to the thriving of crime. Albeit recently applied to organized crime (Vander Beken, 2004), the employment of this approach in the field corruption has so far been neglected by the scientific community. By focusing on the ethical framework developed by MNEs operating in the pharmaceutical sector, the presentation aims to assess whether Compliance Programmes provide opportunities to corrupt activities. The results emerging from the analysis will provide some insight into the vulnerabilities to corruption presented by the MNEs' Ethics and Compliance Programmes, ultimately helping policy-makers to better understand and subsequently counter the phenomenon in the pharmaceutical sector. In fact, in order to make strides in the fight against corruption, policy makers shall better understand, alongside the structure taken, the type of actors involved, and the motivations recalled, the vulnerable areas that increase the likelihood of this crime. The better these characteristics are known at the policy level, the more likely effective countermeasures are to be envisaged and adopted in the struggle towards the eradication of corruption