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

This indicator is defined as the percentage of persons who paid at least one bribe (gave a public official money, a gift or counter favour) to a public official or were asked for a bribe by these public officials, in the last 12 months, as a percentage of persons who had at least one contact with a public official in the same period.

Ministry of Public Service

Ministry of Public Service

Ministry of Public Service

Percentage (%)

Corruption is an antonym of equal accessibility to public services and of correct functioning of the economy; as such, it has a negative impact on fair distribution of resources and development opportunities. Besides, corruption erodes public trust in authorities and the rule of law; when administrative bribery becomes a recurrent experience of large sectors of the population and businesses, its negative effects have an enduring negative impact on the rule of law, democratic processes and justice. By providing a direct measure of the experience of bribery, this indicator provides an objective metric of corruption, a yardstick to monitor progress in the fight against corruption.

In the International Classification of Crime for Statistical Purposes (ICCS), bribery is defined as: ‘Promising, offering, giving, soliciting, or accepting an undue advantage to or from a public official or a person who directs or works in a private sector entity, directly or indirectly, in order that the person act or refrain from acting in the exercise of his or her official duties’. This definition is based on definitions of bribery of national public officials, bribery of foreign public officials and official of international organisations and bribery in the private sector that are contained in the United Nations Convention against Corruption. For this indicator, public official refers to persons holding a legislative, executive, administrative or judicial office. In the operationalization of the indicator, a list of selected officials and civil servants is used.

Recommended disaggregation for this indicator are age, sex of bribe-givers, type of official, income level of bribe-givers and education attainment of bribe-givers.

The indicator is calculated as the total number of persons who paid at least one bribe to a public official in the last 12 months or were asked for a bribe in the same period, over the total number of persons who had at least one contact with a public official in the same period, multiplied by 100.

This indicator is used by the Ministry of Public Service to monitor the level of corruption in the country.

In the experience of several surveys conducted at national and international level, the so-called bribery prevalence rate is defined as the percentage of persons who paid at least one bribe (gave a public official money, a gift or counter favour) to a public official in the last 12 months, as a percentage of persons who had at least one contact with a public official in the same period. In this formulation the share of population who was asked a bribe but did not give it is not included. Available data at national and international level usually refers to this formulation, while the collection of data according to the formulation included in the SDG framework will depend on the adaptation of relevant survey tools and the calculation by national authorities. It is expected that data according to the current definition will become available gradually. On a more general level, it should be noted that this indicator provides solid information on the experience of bribery occurring in the interaction between citizens and the public sector in the context of service delivery/transactions, while it does not cover other forms of corruption, such as ´grand corruption´, trading in influence or abuse of power.

This indicator is derived from household surveys on corruption experience and/or victimisation surveys with a module on bribery. All the metadata shown was gathered from United Nation Statistics Division. The metadata was extracted from https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/metadata/.