The etiquette of bribery | How to grease a palm |

via Economist.com: "Jakob Svensson, an economist at Stockholm University, has cut through cultural stereotypes to search for hard data on corrupt economies. He has found that socialist and recently socialist economies show higher levels of corruption than others. Among the factors he has tested for correlation with corruption is the overall education level of the adult population. A second is openness to imports (measured by imports as a proportion of GDP), which is linked with opportunities for smuggling. A third is freedom of the press (as ranked by Freedom House, a civil-liberties watchdog), on the hypothesis that independent journalists will expose, and thereby curtail, corruption. The fourth is the number of days needed to start a business, a proxy for the number of permits required, and therefore red tape. Mr Svensson found clear correlations between all these variables and the overall level of corruption."