The cost of day-to-day bribery
13-09-2013, 07:43 AM
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Bribery between citizens and service providers is often termed ‘petty bribery’. However, this term
suggests that this is a petty or small corruption issue. This is hardly the case. Day-to-day bribery that
occurs at the interface between citizens and public service providers is not only a cost to citizens in
terms of the money that is handed over for unjust reasons, but it also has discriminatory effects on
the provision and management of the service. It creates an environment where citizens resort to unfair
means for access to services or speed of service and where people in charge of these services seek
further opportunities to exploit their position to make more money.
While an average reported bribery rate around the world of 27 per cent is high enough to cause alarm,
this is just the tip of the iceberg to understanding the scale and extent of bribery as it affects people.
Country-specific public opinion surveys which allow us to explore the dynamics of bribery in greater
depth confirm that this type of bribery is by no means petty. The East Africa Bribery Index8 for example
finds that the average bribe paid for land services is more than US$100 (9,842 Kenyan Shilling) in
Kenya and the average value of a bribe paid to the judiciary in Uganda is more than US$200 (594,137
Ugandan Shilling). A survey in Mexico finds that the cost of bribery has a regressive effect on Mexican
households hurting the poor the most, with an average-income household spending 14 per cent of
that income on bribes and those with the lowest incomes spending 33 per cent.9 In Greece, the total
