Marco Arnone, Leonardo S. Borlini, Corruption - Economic Analysis and International Law, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, Northampton, 2014, pp. xxviii - 630

Where public and private corruption proliferates, markets are dominated by distortions and inefficiencies, as public spending, the free choice of consumers, customers and economic operators are negatively influenced and oppressed by bribery, fraud and anticompetitive behaviors. Corruption therefore undermines the economic process, both at national and international level, and is constantly associated to weak governance, where both the private and the public sector have a considerable amount of discretion out of any control. The volume Corruption - Economic Analysis and International Law offers the most complete and updated analysis on the international legal framework set up for fighting against corruption. The concept of corruption adopted by the two authors -the late Marco Arnone, who mainly wrote the chapters on the economics and socio-politics of corruption (pp. 1-179), and Leonardo Borlini, who is responsible for the entire legal analysis of the corruption phenomenon (pp. 183-528), beyond coauthoring some sections together with the prematurely passed away economist- is inspired by the famous definitions set up by Transparency International, the World Bank or the United Nations Development Programme: one may speak of corruption with reference to any case where a private subject or a public official accepts or requests forms of private gain in order to behave or adopt decisions based on criteria different from those which would have guided her/his optimal professional working activity. In particular, the book is mainly focused on "public" corruption, i.e. on the abuse of public office for personal illicit profit -as it is well known, "private" corruption denotes instead the situation when one economic operator, or a firm, bribes another economic operator or the representative of another firm, no one of them representing a public institution. The two parts of the present publication -the first one dealing with the economics, finance, and governance concerning corruption; and the second part devoted to the birth and evolution of a global anti-corruption legal standard- are organized in five sections and 17 chapters.