Is Bribery Really Regressive? Bribery’s Costs, Benefits, and Mechanisms

We use data on households’ bribery of public officials in Peru and Uganda to analyze the distribution by income of the burden of bribery, the mechanisms leading to it, and the payoffs to bribery. We show the burden of bribery is not borne disproportionately by the poor. Among bribers, the poor do pay a greater share of their income than the rich, but the rich use officials more often, and among users, the rich are more likely to bribe. The benefit of bribery is avoidance of the poor service delivered to clients who refuse to bribe.