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The methods of constraining corruption typically adopted in Western industrialized societies, increasing the transparency and accountability of decision‐making, and intensifying the enforcement of criminal justice prohibitions, have not always proved to be effective in developing countries. This is not surprising, given that in many of them the resources available for law enforcement are relatively modest, and corruption is deeply embedded culturally. In this paper, I suggest a strategy of reducing the opportunities for corruption, rather than attempting to suppress it altogether. I focus on regulatory institutions and procedures, identifying key aspects to these arrangements, which, if appropriately designed, can achieve this goal. Some of the design strategies that I advocate are inconsistent with the models of regulatory arrangements that Western institutions have been urging developing countries to adopt.

Three main tasks can be identified for comparative law. The first is to investigate differences between legal systems and, in particular, to distinguish between "real" differences, where the outcomes of the application of principles diverge between legal systems, and "superficial" differences, where similar outcomes are masked by the conceptual structures of the relevant systems. The second is to trace developments in the relationships between legal systems and thus to explore tendencies of convergence or divergence (in terms of "real" differences), noting that in some areas convergence may be required under international legal instruments. The third task is to explain and to evaluate such developments: why do systems converge or diverge? Is convergence desirable or undesirable?

1. Setting the scene. 2. Law and wealth creation. 3. The structure of the law. 4. Implicit pricing and behavioural incentives. 5. Risk allocation and risk management. -- 6. Corrective justice : damage, causation and responsibility -- 7. Wrongdoing and welfare maximisation -- 8. Protecting the disadvantaged. -- 9. Lawyers and their influence on the law. -- 10. Conclusions : is there an economist in the house?

The Law and Economics perspective on injunctive relief has been developed primarily from the Calabresi and Melamed (1972) distinction between property rules and liability rules, two different judicial means of enforcing legal rights. Their analysis is predicated on the assumption that, if the prevention of the unlawful activity by an injunction does not reach an efficient solution between the relevant parties, then the latter can modify the terms of the injunction by means of bilateral negotiation, drawing on Coase's basic analysis. The approach is particularly important once it is appreciated that legal entitlements are imperfectly formulated and that, in appropriate circumstances, legal wrongdoing can increase social welfare. For example, in areas where intellectual property rights are particularly difficult to formulate because of the high technology involved, too rigid an enforcement of those imperfectly targeted rights generates welfare losses. The task for economic analysis is then to determine whether injunctive relief or damages is preferable in the particular circumstances governing the parties' activities. This largely involves comparing on the one hand the welfare losses which arise from imperfect damages awards which arise predominantly where the court has high information costs in assessing the plaintiff's losses (particularly where those losses are subjective and therefore cannot be determined by reference to market evaluation) or include irrecoverable third-party losses with, on the other hand, the transaction costs of negotiating a compromise solution or the welfare losses arising from a holdout (both conditions are likely where more than two parties are involved). One branch of the literature has added a new dimension to this analysis. It is concerned to explore how the choice of remedy ex post affects behaviour ex ante, in particular the propensity to invest. In addition, literature on optimal enforcement provides insights regarding the optimal timing of sanctions, which is relevant for the choice between injunctions (the first possible stage of legal intervention) and damages (the last possible stage).