While I am at the issue of bribery, I would like to touch on the recently released Transparency International’s Global Corruption Barometer 2010 report that the chart from the Daily Chart blog is based on.
After reading it, or rather, skimming through it, I suspect some of the results underestimate what are actually happening on the ground. Of a particular interest in one question where it asks whether the questionnaire participant has bribed a public official within the past 12 months. According to the report, in Malaysia the survey was done through face to face method.[1]
Now ask this question. If some stranger asked, ”Have you bribed a public official before?”, what would be your answer?
Given that you do not know who the stranger is, and if you have bribed a public official before, would you actually say yes?
What if the stranger is a police officer and he or she is trying to trap you? What if the stranger recognizes you and reports you to the police after the interview? What if the stranger shares the information with the public, thus ruining your reputation?
Would it not be safer to say no?
I would think there is an incentive to be dishonest and say no. It is the most rational action to take given the uncertainty caused by the face to face method.
Thus, the aggregate answer to the question is likely to underestimate the true occurrence of this specific kind of bribery.
The further implication arising from this problem is this: the report indicates that 9% of members of the Malaysian sample have bribed a public official before in the last 12 months. Assuming good faith that the survey is representative, one could generalize that 9% of Malaysians have bribed a public official before. Due to the concern of underestimation however, the best one could say about the result is that at least 9% of Malaysians have bribed public official before in the same period.
If one wants to take the implication to the extreme, notice that there is no qualification about the maximum limit. Scary, is it not?
[1] — Global Corruption Barometer 2010. Page 35 and 39. Transparency International. December 2010
2 replies on “[2286] Of underestimation in Transparency International’s report”
I take a pretty cynical view about getting BN out of power. Out or not, what is important is the presence of competitive politics to keep one side or the other honest. I don’t believe anyone is purely or permanently corrupt/bad.
What makes their corrupt or honest is the situation they find themselves in, hence the importance of good institution/environment, like competitive politics.
It is worrying to say the least.
My sister once admonished me for going on record to say that I had to bribe DBKL officials for my pub license.
We’ll probably never see the end of corruption in Malaysia in our lifetime, but we can start when BN is taken out of government next year.