Introduction

This book is the outcome of a roundtable organized by us and held in Montevideo, Uruguay, on May 26–27, 2016. It is an ambitious project because of the breadth of its reach. There is increasing recognition, albeit with a long history of forays into this, from the time of Karl Polanyi (1944), through the writings of Mark Granovetter (1985), to the emergence of new institutional economics (see North 1990; Williamson 2000), that economics cannot be viewed in isolation. It is a discipline embedded in institutions, politics, and the law and, if we are to be more effective in terms of the impact of economic policy, we have to recognize this embeddedness and design our interventions with this in mind. Further, the perpetrators of corruption often work, hand in hand, with the functionaries of government, who, ironically, are supposed to enforce the law (see, for instance, Kugler et al. 2005). The World Bank’s most-recent World Development Report on Governance and the Law (World Bank 2017) is a recognition of the significance of these perspectives. And our roundtable assembled some of the finest minds that have contributed to this multidisciplinary venture to do a stocktaking of the best ideas and how they can be put to action on the ground. It was an engaging two days of discussion and debate.