This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, September 29th, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The business environment in the developing world offers unique challenges.

Some of those challenges are posed by the very groups that claim

to champion those struggling societies.

Anne Bernstein heads the Center for Development and Enterprise in South Africa. She is author of the

new book The Case for Business in Developing Economies.

We spoke following a forum for the book yesterday.

People who live in rich industrialized countries take for granted that courts work, that parliaments work, that there's

certain rules of what you can and can't do and that citizens vote at regular elections and have the confidence and the opportunity

to organize and promote their own interests between elections.

In many developing countries, the state is weak,

and some of those institutions are either new or don't work very well,

or a range of other things that people in rich countries just take for granted

don't happen, Whether it's the potholes in the street being fixed or the

electricity working or the court system working in an efficient way.

So a whole lot of these things

and some of the more important issues,

like what are the rules of the game in terms of foreign investment, are not sorted out.

So these are societies in the making often, which makes the admonition that business should just follow the laws of the land

a bit more complicated when the laws of the land are in process of being formulated or

debated hotly or don't yet exist.

...