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Table 2 Bribery for services after controlling for contact No contact (%) Health Education Permits Police Courts
42 64 61 75 87
Contact, no bribe (%) 49 31 32 19 10
Contact, bribe (%) 9 5 7 6 3
Bribe % contact 16 14 18 24 23
Source Global Corruption Barometer 2016; 98 countries. Dominican Republic and Nicaragua excluded because of inadequate contact data
reporting having paid a bribe in the past year. This may reflect that longterm recall is low and so any experience of bribery years ago is unlikely to affect current attitudes. Bribes vary by service. Generalizations about corruption in public services imply that bribery is much the same for every service. This is not the case. The 2016 GCB found that bribes are most often paid for the health service and for permits (Table 2). By contrast, the fewest people pay bribes for court services. The chief reason for this is that far fewer people have, or want to have, contact with the courts than with health and education. Controlling for contact gives a different rank order. Among people who contact the service, almost one-quarter pay bribes to the courts and to the police. The apparent high level of bribery for health and education is because these are much needed and used services. After controlling for contact, the percentage of users paying a bribe for health care or education is significantly lower than that of people paying bribes to law enforcement officials. The more contacts people have with public services, the more likely they are to pay at least one bribe, but the increase is not proportional (Fig. 4). Among GCB respondents using one service, 14% pay a bribe. However, when the number of services contacted doubles, the proportion paying a bribe increases by only one-quarter and when it quadruples, the proportion paying bribes just doubles. Among heavy users of public services, the median respondent paid a bribe for only one service (see Rose and Peiffer 2015: Fig. 4). When bribery happens. The use of an abstraction such as bureaucracy is dehumanizing in the literal sense, since it says nothing about the people whose behaviour immediately determines what the system does. The critical stage in the process of service delivery occurs when a person comes
