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Share of people who recently paid a bribe or were asked for one

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Clean Water & Sanitation

What you should know about this indicator

  • This measure tracks how common bribery is when citizens interact with public officials.
  • It shows, out of all people who dealt with a public official in the last year, how many of them either paid a bribe or were asked to pay one.
  • Bribes include extra payments, gifts, or favors given in exchange for special treatment from government workers.
  • The focus is on everyday administrative bribery—the type most citizens face in routine interactions with public officials.
  • Public officials can hold a legislative, executive, administrative or judicial office, such as customs or police officers, judges, teachers or doctors.
  • It does not cover high-level political corruption, influence trading, or abuse of power.
  • Data is collected through national surveys. Respondents report only their own direct experiences, though cases involving middlemen are included. Indirect accounts from other household members are not.
  • Bribery usually leaves no trace in financial records or documentation. Surveys offer a practical approach for measuring these events.
  • Many surveys have historically excluded people who were asked for a bribe but refused to pay. This leads to underestimates and could be one reason for lower reported shares in earlier years. More countries are now using standardized methods to address this.

This indicator is defined as the percentage of persons who paid at least one bribe (gave a public official money, a gift or counter favour) to a public official, or were asked for a bribe by these public officials, in the last 12 months, as a percentage of persons who had at least one contact with a public official in the same period.

In the International Classification of Crime for Statistical Purposes (ICCS), bribery is defined as: ‘Promising, offering, giving, soliciting, or accepting an undue advantage to or from a public official or a person who directs or works in a private sector entity, directly or indirectly, in order that the person act or refrain from acting in the exercise of his or her official duties’ (ICCS Category 07031).

This definition is based on definitions of bribery of national public officials, bribery of foreign public officials and official of international organisations and bribery in the private sector that are contained in the United Nations Convention against Corruption (articles 15, 16, and 21). While the concept of bribery is broader, as it includes also actions such as promising or offering, and it covers both public and private sector, this indicator focuses on specific forms of bribery that are more measurable (the giving and/or requesting of bribes) and it limits the scope to the public sector.

The concept of undue advantage is operationalized by reference to giving of money (in addition to an official fee), gifts or provision of a service requested/offered by/to a public official in exchange for a special treatment. This indicator captures the often called ‘administrative bribery’, which is often intended as the type of bribery affecting citizens in their dealings with public administrations and/or civil servants.

For this indicator, public official refers to persons holding a legislative, executive, administrative or judicial office.

In the operationalization of the indicator, a list of selected officials and civil servants is used.

Further information available at: https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/metadata/files/Metadata-16-05-01.pdf

Share of people who recently paid a bribe or were asked for one
Share of people who, in the past 12 months, paid or were asked to pay a bribe, out of all people who had contact with a public official.
Source
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime – with minor processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
August 27, 2024
Next expected update
August 2026
Date range
2004–2022
Unit
%

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Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) dataset is the primary collection of data tracking progress towards the SDG indicators, compiled from officially-recognized international sources.

Retrieved on
August 27, 2024
Retrieved from
https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/dataportal
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime via UN SDG Indicators Database (https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/dataportal), UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (accessed 2024). More information available at: https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/metadata/files/Metadata-16-05-01.pdf.

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All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

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Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Share of people who recently paid a bribe or were asked for one”, part of the following publication: Hannah Ritchie, Fiona Spooner, and Max Roser (2021) - “Clean Water and Sanitation”. Data adapted from United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/bribery-prevalence-un [online resource]
How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime – with minor processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime – with minor processing by Our World in Data. “Share of people who recently paid a bribe or were asked for one” [dataset]. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, “Data from multiple sources” [original data]. Retrieved May 15, 2025 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/bribery-prevalence-un