A Value-Added Approach to Business Ethics

This essay examines challenges facing international businesses in developing areas in relation to alternative views of development, business strategy, and ethics. It adopts an institutional view of development and favours asset development rather than cost minimization business strategies. The essay contrasts ethical strategies that primarily operate in keeping with benchmarks to those that seek to add value. Using a variety of examples, the essay makes a case for a value-added approach. The essay explores how internationally connected businesses can add or deplete economic values gauged in relation not only to productive and financial capital but also in relation to human, social, and natural capital. The essay argues that international businesses can foster or frustrate development depending in large part on the extent to which they aim to strengthen their own assets, broadly understood, and those of their immediate stakeholders.