Column Actions

Share of business population who paid or was paid a bribe by public official.

Proportion of firms asked for a gift or informal payment when meeting with tax officials. Enterprise Surveys are firm-level surveys conducted in World Bank client countries. The survey focuses on various aspects of the business environment as well as firm’s outcome measures such as annual sales, productivity, etc. The surveys are conducted via face-to-face interviews with the top manager or business owner. For each country, the survey is conducted approximately every 4-5 years.

Ministry of Public Service

Ministry of Public Service

Annual

Percentage (%)

Paying taxes are required of formal forms in most countries and hence the rational for this indicator is to measure the incidence of corruption during this routine interaction. The key strength of the Enterprise Survey is that most of the questions in the survey pertain to the actual, day-to-day experiences of the firm; this question regarding corruption during tax inspections/meetings is not an opinion-based question but rather a question grounded in the firm’s reality.

The respondents to the Enterprise Survey are firms- either manufacturing or services establishments. These are registered (formal) firms with 5+ employees. The firms are either fully or partially private (100% state-owned firms are ineligible for the Enterprise Survey). More information on the survey methodology can be found on the Methodology page of the website: http://www.enterprisesurveys.org/methodology

A gift or an informal payment is considered a ‘bribe’.

The Enterprise Survey captures several descriptive characteristics of the respondent firms including: gender of top manager, primary business activity of the firm, subnational location of the firm, exporting status, number of employees, degree of foreign ownership, and several other characteristics. Hence the indicator can be disaggregated by the levels of these individual characteristics.

The indicator is calculated for each country, by looking at the proportion of firms which answered ‘yes’ to the survey question. For all Enterprise Survey projects conducted since 2006, the resulting dataset has sampling weights. Hence the indicator value, which is computed using Stata, incorporates these sampling weights as well as the design strata.

This indicator is used by the Ministry of Public Service to ascertain whether firms are solicited for gifts or informal payments (i.e. bribes) when meeting with public officials.

• Face-to-face survey projects can be expensive in some countries and hence due to budget limitations, the World Bank hasn’t been able to update some of the Enterprise Surveys data in a subset of countries. Another limitation is that the surveys are done mostly in World Bank client countries and hence most high-income countries are not covered by the surveys (US, Canada, Western European countries, Japan, GCC countries, etc.).
• Another limitation may be the sensitive nature of corruption. In some countries/cultures, firms may not be comfortable answering questions on corruption. Although the data is collected under the context of confidentiality, firms may refuse to answer the question if they have been subject to bribery solicitations. Hence, in some countries, the actual incidence of this particular type of corruption may be higher than the calculated indicator value.

All the metadata shown was gathered from United Nation Statistics Division. The metadata was extracted from https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/metadata/.