By IRNA,
Berlin : A survey released here Thursday by the anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International (TI) said one in four people throughout the world admitted they paid a bribe last year.
According to TI, around 60 percent of those questioned said the problem of bribery had worsened.
The worst place for bribery was sub-Saharan Africa, with more than half those surveyed saying they had paid bribes in the past 12 months followed by the Middle East and North Africa, with more than one-third having paid bribes.
In Europe and North America, that rate stood at five percent.
Almost half of all respondents said they paid bribes to avoid problems with the authorities and a quarter said it was to speed up processes.
The political and public sectors were globally viewed as most corrupt, with nearly 80 percent of respondents believing political parties were affected.
Public officials were ranked second at 62 percent.
However, the survey found also that seven out of 10 people would report an incident of corruption if they witnessed one, although that number fell to about half if they themselves were the victim.
Most worrying is the fact that bribes to the police have almost doubled since 2006, and more people report paying bribes to the judiciary and for public administrative services compared to five years ago.
The list of bribe-takers included police, health officials and tax collectors, according to the TI report which collected data came from surveys of more than 91,000 people in 86 nations or other territories.
‘The 2010 Corruption Perceptions Index shows that nearly three quarters of the 178 countries in the index score below five, on a scale from 10 (very clean) to 0 (highly corrupt). These results indicate a serious corruption problem,’ the report emphasized..
More than 20 countries report significantly more petty bribery than in 2006, when the same question was asked in the Barometer.
The biggest number of reported bribery payments in 2010 is in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Cameroon, India, Iraq, Liberia, Nigeria, Palestine, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Uganda where more than 50 per cent of people surveyed paid a bribe in the past 12 months.