Are corruption and bribery synonymous terms?
Corruption is the abuse of public power for private benefit, and that private benefit is most often in the form of an illicit money or in-kind payment from a client to the agent, i.e. a bribe. Economic literature on corruption tends to focus on bribery. Rose-Ackerman (1999) does not seem to distinguish between the two. Wei (1999), focusing on the public sector, simply defines corruption as government officials abusing their power to extract/accept bribes from the private sector for personal benefit. It is probable that the general public too would associate corruption very strongly with bribery. This is not unimportant, since many of the existing indicators are based surveys on peoples perception of the corruption level (more on this later).
