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Abstract
Whereas most studies find the poor in Africa to be more vulnerable to bribery because of their lower socio-economic status, this paper proposes institutional differences as an alternative explanation. Because poor people are unable to afford privately provided services, they must use public services. In relying on the state more often, the poor become more vulnerable to bribery. Analyses of Afrobarometer data show that the poor are not more likely to pay bribes for state monopolised services. The poor’s disproportionate vulnerability to bribery for choice services is a function of their greater likelihood to have contact with the state.
Acknowledgements
Afrobarometer provided the data used, and the full dataset can be found here: www.afrobarometer.org. Upon an emailed request, the authors can provide the Stata code used to produce the analyses.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Our focus is on public sector bribery, not bribes made to non-state actors.
2. In an analysis of the 2005 Afrobarometer survey, Razafindrakoto and Roubaud (Citation2007) include a variable that they label as measuring contact but this is a flawed measure of contact because respondents not having contact were given two non-mutually exclusive response options to the bribery questions: They could say that they had ‘never paid a bribe’ or had ‘no experience’ with the service. The unusual variations across countries with these two responses showed that ‘no experience’ was not universally used as an indication of non-contact. For example, less than 3 per cent of Benin’s sample reported ‘no experience’ with services.
3. The World Bank’s World Development Index (WDI) provides data on the per cent of primary and secondary school aged children that attend private institutions. For all Afrobarometer countries (and most other African countries), private institutions are used by varying percentages of primary and secondary school aged children. The WDI also shows all African countries, except Somalia, report having both private and public health expenditures. Comparable data on the private/public provision of water and sanitation services is not provided by the WDI and could not be found elsewhere.
4. This is somewhat surprising given that Justesen and Bjornskov (Citation2014) find that well off urbanites are least likely bribe payers. In an unreported multinomial logit model, we test for the significance of this interaction term; the interaction term was significantly associated with being a bribe payer to both types of services, but not to the other two categories. The estimated effect, however, was in an unexpected direction; for the least poor (a minimum score on the poverty index), being an urbanite is estimated to increase the probability of being a bribe payer to both types of services by just 2 per cent. Also tested were each of the models, restricted to a sample of urbanites only. Our main findings were robust in these unreported models as well; specifically, the multinomial logit revealed that the poor in urban areas were no more likely to pay bribes for monopoly services than not pay a bribe, but were more likely to pay a bribe for choice services and to both types of services. And the Heckman analysis showed that the poor in urban areas were more likely to have contact with non-monopoly services, and once this contact was accounted for, were no more likely to pay a bribe for those services.
5. Due to concerns of potential endogeneity of perceptions of corruption and the payment of bribes, in unreported models we reran the analyses in and , excluding perceptions of corruption as a control variable. The results of these models were very similar to those reported; most important, the significance and direction of poverty’s influence on contact and bribery is estimated to be the same in both sets of tests.