What is it about?
The paper compares two common types of bribes, facilitation payments and bribes to win a contract, and asks whether one kind is more damaging than the other. It draws a distinction between two types of harm that arise from paying bribes, primary and secondary. Although the primary harm varies on a case by case basis, all bribes lead to a secondary harm because they undermine the rule of law. However, even this harm may vary according to the context: the paper concludes that bribes are most harmful in transition or developing countries that are striving to establish the rule of law, because the secondary harm undermines that critical process.
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Why is it important?
Most anti-bribery laws distinguish between 'facilitation payments' and bribes 'to gain a business advantage'. Facilitation payments are often exempt from the laws, or unlikely to be prosecuted, yet they are also bribes. The paper asks whether there is an ethical basis for the distinction: are facilitation payments less harmful than other kinds of bribes?
Perspectives
It has always puzzled me that this distinction exists in the law, and sends a very confused message to companies seeking to comply. When you look at individual cases, the reason for the distinction often seems to collapse. I wanted to have a more rigorous look at whether there is a basis for the distinction in ethics, and this led me to make some of my own claims about ethical differences between bribes, but depending less on their 'type' and more on the context in which they occur.
Dr Elizabeth David-Barrett
University of Sussex
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Are Some Bribes More Harmful than Others? Exploring the Ethics Behind Anti-bribery Laws, Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics, January 2014, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0260107914540830.
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