Ib Briefing Paper

Lillian Guzman

TTH: 11:00 AM

Briefing Paper #1

How corruption has affected Brazil

Ethics are absolute principles that need to be adopted by companies, especially those who are going to conduct business across borders. If a firm does not set up strong ethical strategies, managers or even employees may not feel loyalty toward their company and can turn their back at anytime. In turn, firms would then have to deal with corruption issues. According to Marguerite Rigoglioso, “In some countries, corruption is so common that it is as expected as a handshake when ordinary people or businesses deal with government officials” (Rigoglioso). In the 1970’s, the United States passed the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. It was enacted after discovering that several firms were paying off government officials in other countries to gain a competitive advantage. Corruption is still a major ethical issue that is practiced even after laws and regulations have been passed. If firms are able to get away with it, it can help them in several aspects of their business, therefore bringing in a lot of profits. With that being said, in this paper I will describe how corruption has affected a developing country like Brazil, and the processes it is undergoing to eliminate a majority of these issues to make it a more attractive economically developing country.

Corruption is everywhere and particularly in Latin American countries. Unfortunately, many of the developing countries are those that are encountering many corruption issues. Brazil is one of many South American countries that have struggled with corruption. At some point, it hurt their economic productivity. Recently, the Brazilian government has begun to prosper, and they do not want to be held back by these issues, so they implementing laws and regulations that will hopefully slow down and eventually eliminate the problem.

All in all, corruption leads to unwanted problems like crime, murder, and espionage...