Corruption research
60%
50% Percentage of respondents with contact that have paid a bribe
316
40%
30%
20%
10%
0% Total sample
Africa
Latin America
NIS
Asia-Pacific
SE Europe
North America
EU+
Source: TI Global Corruption Barometer 2006
Figure 2: The percentage of respondents that have paid a bribe to the police by regional grouping2
and private sectors. While bribery for services does not seem to be a major problem in these regions, this does not necessarily invalidate people’s concerns regarding large-scale corruption.
The efficacy of governments’ fight against corruption It is interesting to examine how well respondents believe their governments are tackling corruption, or whether they indicate that government is actually encouraging corruption to continue. For governments that have been in power for a short period of time, it is unreasonable to lay the entire blame for corruption in the country at their door. The results shown in table 1, below, highlight the poor opinion that the majority of respondents have of their governments’ anti-corruption efforts. By far the most common answer is that the government is ‘not effective’ in its anti-corruption activities.
2 The regional groupings used here are: EU and other Western European Countries (EU ): Austria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom; South East Europe: Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Romania, Serbia and Turkey; Newly Independent States (NIS): Moldova, Russia and Ukraine; Africa: Cameroon, Congo-Brazzaville, Gabon, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa; Latin America: Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru and Venezuela; Asia-Pacific: Fiji, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea (South), Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand; and North America: Canada and the United States.