I wonder how similar bribery culture is to tip culture. In the US where we tip restaurant workers, restaurant wages are often much lower than comparable positions in industries that don't have tipping, so much so that the difference is often explicitly included in minimum wage laws. Do countries with more bribery experience a similar effect, where the wages of police officers and other bribery-prone worker are much lower than they would otherwise be?
If so, that creates a pretty tricky equilibrium problem. Even if I think bribery is ethically wrong, I don't want to be in a position where I'm asking someone else to accept less than their "fair"/expected/equilibrium wage. Higher wages might be a prerequisite for getting rid of a culture of bribery, but at the same time, raising wages per se probably doesn't do much to reduce bribery in the short term?
Yes. Policemen are getting pretty low wages. But there are always a lot of people who want to work there, because they can get bribes. And they actually paying percentage of those bribes to their higher-ups and so on, so it's like a pyramid. And a lot of people want things to stay that way. Policemen are getting good income. Their masters are getting huge income. Ordinary people can pay much less to policeman, than they would pay in fines. It's that terrible win-win to everyone situation and that makes it very hard to destroy.
> It's that terrible win-win to everyone situation and that makes it very hard to destroy.
It does make it sound like there's a bribery-free equilibrium really close by though. Like imagine all of these things happened as part of a single reform:
- Policeman and management salaries go up.
- Fines go down.
- Taxes go up.
- Anti-bribery enforcement goes way up.
The idea would be to acknowledge that regardless of the bribery culture, the typical policeman might be doing a decent job and doesn't necessarily deserve an effective pay cut. The amount of money they're getting today is in some sense their "market rate", and the goal is to improve the efficiency and transparency of the system in other ways without shifting that market rate. Likewise the goal would be that the tax increases for citizens would be designed to match what they're paying in bribes and fines today, so they wouldn't actually end up paying more.
I assume the hard part is that each of these things by itself might make the problem worse, and it's only if they all change at the same time that you get a coherent result that's "good for everyone". And there are probably a ton of other factors to add to the list. (Like tax enforcement. Is it even possible to raise taxes to accommodate salary increases and fee decreases? If the tax code needs to be reformed before people will accept stricter enforcement of it, what are those reforms, and who would fight them?)
People don't respect police, so when government would want to massively increase their salaries, people would protest against it. Fines go down is a good thing for sure, but it'll reduce amount of money going to local budgets, so people in government will protest against it (because they'll need to find money to replace those from reduced fines). Taxes go up: nobody likes it. Anti-bribery goes way up: when everyone's corrupt, nobody wants it.
It might work when someone like president or minister really wants to do that and have support. But it's more like mini-revolution. It's hard to go there evolutionary. But may be I'm wrong.
Hah I really love discussions like that, everyone is right to some certain point.
If there would be one size fits all solution, we’d had one of those.
Generally the quintessence is the big role of money.
But you just can’t create money out of nothing. Money comes from actions, money causes actions. If the Cashflow is redirected, something else will suffer from it.
That won't yield much because the gap between even a 100% increase in salary and the amount of bribes they collect is vast.
E.g. salary of an inspector could be, say INR 40k-50k per month but the bribes being collected typically would be millions of INR. Suppose an inspector has 15 people reporting to him who are collecting INR 200 from 300 people per day and the inspectors share in this is just 5%. Then the amount per month is 200 * 300 * 30 * 15 * .05 = INR 1350000. If I assume the salary to be 50k per month, this bribe amount is 27 times that. It is just not possible for the government to get the salary even in the same vicinity (just for kicks, Indian President's salary is about INR 500000 per month).
"The Big Bribe Industry" is a very organized sector and unofficially official. It is absolutely naive to believe that it can be destroyed. It is almost impossible to get a job done in a timely manner without bribing the official.
The rates are fixed. The collection mechanisms are solid. Everyone, from the peon to the minister, gets a cut.
No. The moment bribe is legalized, it stops being a bribe. That is, the officials get a kick out of this whole shady operation. If we deny them this pleasure, they will find other ways.
As it stands today, there is no accountability in the whole system. An official can sit on a file for years with no repercussions. You can drag them to court, but sooner than later you will understand that this is a battle you can never win. The official has the power and money of the
government behind him while you are totally alone. Most importantly, the official has time while you do not.
That's a very accurate description of how it is where I live. But at the end you call it a terrible win-win for everyone. If it's a win-win for everyone how can it also be terrible?
I think that it's like local maximum. There's higher maximum when everyone obeys the law and everyone's getting good salary. But it's hard to move there, because nobody wants to do it now. Also it creates bad incentive for police to arrest innocent people and to blackmail money from them for things they did not do, and it does not punish enough those who need punishment, so they do not learn their lessons and continue to break laws.
Because people are getting away with ignoring the law, and in turn that makes bad laws more transparent, which in turn give people even more incentives to bribe their way out of situations.
I heard that post-war Germany had a massive corruption problem so they made bribing legal (but not bribe taking) and bribes tax-exempt. So everyone declared their bribes on their tax returns, the bribees were discouraged (or prosecuted) and the problem was solved. But this only works if you pursue the bribe takers.
"See Implementing the 1996 OECD Recommendation on the Tax Deductibility of Bribes to Foreign Public Officials, OECD (May 26, 1997) (Report by the Committee on Fiscal Affairs ("CFA") to the OECD Council at Ministerial Level) [hereinafter Implementation of Tax Deductibility Recommendation] (describing current member state practices regarding the tax treatment of overseas bribes). Attitudes of OECD Member countries concerning the deductibility of bribes to foreign officials vary greatly. See id. at 7. The laws vary accordingly but in most countries, bribes across borders are deductible as business expenses. See id. at 7-8; M. Javade Chaudri, OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions (Conference on Corruption, American University, Washington College of Law. April 6. 1998). in 2 COMBATING CORRUPTION-RECENT MULTILATERAL INITIATIVES 252 (1998) [hereinafter 2 COMBATING CORRUPTION I (on file with author) (summarizing and analyzing the OECD Convention, listing the signatories to its provisions, and noting that foreign bribery and related tax-deductibility is an accepted German business practice). The OECD Member countries are: Australia, Austria, Belgium.
Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland. France. Germany. Greece. Hungary.
Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands. New Zealand,
Norway, Poland, Portugal, South Korea, Spain. Sweden. Switzerland. Turkey.
United Kingdom, United States. See id. at 261."
And? INAL but I believe taking bribes is worse legally than not paying taxes so if you are willing to do the former, then why does the latter really matter? If you are going to take bribes, you are obviously not going to report it for fear of that second infraction because the first one would be worse and thus you wouldn't take the bribe in the first place if the latter infraction scared you.
It's kind of an "on paper" crime, a la Al Capone. You'll get caught quicker if you have a manual audit after paying bribes. The IRS keeps your returns private, for the most part, and if you don't pay you could have 10 years tacked on.
I tend to think the corrupt way is often more fair than nothing. But less fair than a less corrupt system. Notable legal corruption is totally a thing. Just because you're not expected to bribe an police officer doesn't mean the system isn't exploitative.
Raising the police wages in Tunisia (three folds) increased bribery. By increasing their wages, it means they have more power over the actual government. It means they rule the streets and can be more aggressive asking for bribes.
Short answer: No. More wages does not mean less bribery. A strong government that has control over its police force is what reduces bribery.
Raising might not be enough, but it might still be necessary. If you're paying terrible wages and cracking down on bribes, it'll be very hard to recruit.
You've touched on one of the ways I think a country can end up with an ingrained police bribery problem.
The government knows they need a larger police force but that would cost more than the government can afford. How can you have the police force you require without breaking the bank? Easy, just pay the police poorly but let it be known that you will look the other way when they top up their income.
Once this reliance on police corruption is established it is hard to shift. Often the government doesn't have the financial means to unilaterally raise police salaries to a level that removes the need for bribes. And if salaries stay low anti-corruption drives are likely to fail as current police officers need bribes to survive. A genuine reduction in bribery can also cause police officers to quit and make it difficult to recruit new ones.
I've no way of validating this but I've read that tipping in the US was originally a way for patrons to make sure that the server got paid. During the great depression people were often so desperate for work they would be willing to work for free in the hopes that employers would hire them. (This is still a thing in Journalism). Employers would exploit that. Patrons fought back by tipping workers directly.
In the US bribery was fought by unionizing police officers and paying them more. I think low pay is behind bribery in a lot of countries.
Amusing story from an old gay dude I met at a party. In the sixties he rented an apartment on the fifth floor of a building in New York. About a month after he moved in the fire house held a 'charity drive' and the firemen essentially mugged him to put $20 in the bucket. Couple month later he locked himself out of his apartment and the firemen used a hook and ladder truck to get into his apartment and unlock the door.
Tipping originated a long time ago, but grew popular in the USA as a way to avoid paying newly freed slaves the same as non African Americans for work.
That might be true, but those articles are using a restaurant employees advocacy group as their only source. And beyond that one person's conjecture, there isn't much evidence that it's actually true.
I agree. If tipping really came to prominence during that time period, I wouldn't at all be surprised if it had a racist history. But given that no one at the time hid their racism, I'm surprised that neither article could manage to make a clear connection.
I found a Time article agreeing, but upon further investigation it cites the exact same advocacy group as their source as well. I'll agree with plausible but dubious.
I'm pretty opposed to tipping as a practice, or at least the reduced minimum wage for tipped positions, but I was expecting more from those articles. If you strip away the appeals to identity politics they are much less interesting or compelling. The WP article basically goes away save for a handful of cherrypicked sources. The Time article retains some vague handwaving about how many restaurant workers were former slaves around the time tipping caught on--how do they fail to draw a clear connection to racism in a time when overt racism was a point of pride?
^ It's actually the separate, minimum pay wage that emerged from that period - and that subsequently made tipping more customary. Tipping had been around for a while already.
"Indian citizens pay approximately £3 billion (about $4.9 billion) in bribes each year." So with a million government/bribe-able officials in the country, that's $4900 a person, easily a doubling of salary.
There are FAR more than a million bribeable government workers in India. According to the ILO there were 55 million public sector employees in 2014. [1]
It isn't clear what percentage of them work in jobs that involve interaction with the public / businesses (and are therefore bribeable), but I would guess 50%, not 2%.
There are quite a few other factors to this calculation, though.
Quite often, bribe receivers pay a portion to their managers (who aren't directly bribeable but make hiring and promotion decisions). This happens in property registration offices for instance.
Also, not everyone bribeable actually takes bribes. There's a significant number that don't. For instance many postal workers and doctors don't take bribes.
Finally, bribes are very unequally distributed. A minister might get paid $100m, and bribes would basically form 100% of their income.
Tangential anecdata:- I know H1B workers who paid a "monthly % of their salary" to their Indian managers for bringing/sending them to the US on an H1B visa.
Yes and the system isnt all bad. For example, in the country I reside in, getting caught on drug charges would require paying a large sum to get off, which is kind of cool, because a primary job of police is to enforce drug laws, but who should pay for that, really? Should all the people who dont do drugs have to pay, like we do it in America? This way, the salaries of the police aren't paid by the whole populace but rather by the people guilty of the crimes enforced. In a sense, drugs aren't illegal here, they are just very very expensive, and that's possibly just as good of a deterrent.
But, the system is mostly bad. Corruption really holds back poor countries. Lobbying really holds back rich ones.
Well, your system is very different from just having expensive drugs in one key respect - being poor results in imprisonment, not a lack of access to drugs.
This is legally true, but when I waited tables if I ever claimed that my tips didn't get my salary up to minimum wage, I knew I'd be fired. This condition was just shy of explicit. It was the same if someone ran out on their meal. Fortunately most of the time all of my customers paid their meal and tips pushed me over minimum wage, but I remember one slow night that had a diner and dash. I think I paid to work that night.
Life at the lower rungs of the economic ladder is a total blast.
> In the US where we tip restaurant workers, restaurant wages are often much lower than comparable positions in industries that don't have tipping, so much so that the difference is often explicitly included in minimum wage laws.
Petty corruption of the "50 rupee backhander to the traffic cops" variety is indeed unknown in Singapore. However, it's unlikely the upper echelons of power are cleaner than anywhere else, and in fact probably less so because of the concentration of power and wealth in the Lee family.
Bribery and Tip culture are both about public servants being underpaid by the public sector (or by the restaurant sector), and thus it is rationalizing the need for a private economy on top, eg prioritizing certain people and so on.
Bribery though subverts law and order. Tipping might subvert service, but typically tipping is fine after service is rendered as opposed to before as in bribery.
If so, that creates a pretty tricky equilibrium problem. Even if I think bribery is ethically wrong, I don't want to be in a position where I'm asking someone else to accept less than their "fair"/expected/equilibrium wage. Higher wages might be a prerequisite for getting rid of a culture of bribery, but at the same time, raising wages per se probably doesn't do much to reduce bribery in the short term?