Bribery, motivations for bribery and life satisfaction in transitional countries

Hinks, Timothy

Abstract

The focus on bribery and corruption and its impact on life satisfaction is relatively new in the economics and development studies literature. This paper contributes to this emerging field by asking whether reasons for making informal payments are correlated with life satisfaction. We find that paying bribes negatively correlates with life satisfaction and that those who were extorted by public officials or made an informal payment since they thought it was expected of them reported lower life satisfaction levels. We also find that those who made an informal payment to speed things up or who thought of the payment as a gift reported higher life satisfaction. Reasons for bribery differ in their associated significance with life satisfaction by public service that is used and by income group. For example people who instigated informal payments to public officials in the civil courts report higher life satisfaction bringing into question the integrity of judicial systems in transitional countries.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jan 2, 2020
• Online Publication Date: Jan 9, 2020
• Publication Date: Mar 1, 2020
• Deposit Date: Jun 8, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 10, 2022
• Journal: World Development Perspectives
• Electronic ISSN: 2452-2929
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 17
• Article Number: 100172
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wdp.2020.100172
• Keywords: Bribery, Reasons for bribery, Life satisfaction, Transitional countries
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/5145509