GOVERNMENT EFFECTIVENESS AND VIEWS ON FOREIGN BRIBERY The 2011 Bribe Payers Index draws attention to foreign bribery carried out by companies from the world’s leading economies. The governments of these countries and territories have a clear responsibility to address this problem, through both regulatory and legal means. An important first step in the fight against foreign bribery is for a government to have an effective anticorruption system in place at home. Governments must set an example to companies by prohibiting corruption within the public sector and upholding high standards of integrity with no impunity. The link between a government’s fight against corruption at home and foreign bribery by its companies is made apparent by the strong correlation between Transparency International’s Bribe Payers Index and Corruption Perceptions Index, which measures the levels of perceived corruption in the public sector (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: Perceptions of public-sector corruption at home and corporate bribery abroad Graph plots 2011 Bribe Payers Index scores (scale of 0-10, where a maximum score of 10 corresponds with the view that companies from that country never bribe abroad and a 0 corresponds with the view that they always do) against 2010 Corruption Perceptions Index scores (scale of 0-10, where 0 means a country’s public sector is perceived as being highly corrupt and 10 means very clean); n=28. (Correlation coefficient=0.85, P<0.001).
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8
Corruption Perceptions Index
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4
2
0 6
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Bribe Payers Index Country
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Fitted values
Transparency International