According to the polls of the Transparency International anti-corruption movement once again it was declared to the world that bribery and corruption are deeply enrooted in our blood.
The Global Corruption Barometer, a global public opinion survey released found that over half (54%) of those polled believe that the private sector uses bribes to influence public policy, laws and regulations or, in other words, captures the state. As illustrated in Figure 1, this perception is particularly widespread in the Newly Independent States (NIS) : more than 70% of the surveyed pointed to the existence of state capture in their countries. The survey, with more than 73,000 respondents from 69 countries and territories around the world was conducted by Gallup International as a part of Voice of the People Survey in 50 countries and by other polling organizations in 19 countries between October 2008 and February 2009. In Armenia it was carried out by the Georgian Opinion Research Business International organization for 1,000 respondents in the period from January 25 till February 5, 2009 through face-to-face interviews.
The most impressive index (if we may say) is the one related to bribe-giving. Table 1 shows how as a result of polls the respondents confessed that they he/she or members of the family gave away bribes within the last 12 months. In Armenia this index is 43% and was placed in between Uganda and Cambodia. Let us mention that Azerbaijan among the CIS states has a higher index (46%) than Armenia. In Russia 31% of the respondents said that they had bribed, in Ukraine – 21%, Belarus – 13%. But in Russia, the government of which is often scorned by us had an index of 2%. This means that as of bribe-giving we are semi-champions in the world. In addition, the survey pointed out that government efforts to combat corruption are generally perceived as ineffective: 56% of respondents believed their government’s efforts to fight corruption were effective. Among the surveyed CIS countries, Georgia (57% of respondents) and Ukraine (7% of respondents) respectively received the most and the least positive assessments of anti-corruption reforms, whereas in the case of Armenia it was 38% of those who considered the latter as effective. As a comparison let us mention that in Sierra Leanne 64% of the population is confident that their government will be able to fight corruption This means that in this African state people are more confident about their government than in Armenia. Let’s agree that this is a very interesting factor. The respondents have high levels of perceived corruption in political parties (68%), parliaments (63%) and the civil service (60%). Meanwhile, respondents from Armenia view the judiciary as the most corrupt sector (33%). The only bright answer for us is that over half of the Armenians are willing to pay more for a product if it is produced by an uncorrupt company. This means that Armenians are ready to harm their own pockets for the sake of fight against corruption. This fact really speaks on behalf of our society. In this regard, even the Polls and Swiss are behind us. They think of their own good even more and 30% of the people are not willing to pay more for the fight against corruption. Despite the fact that Switzerland doesn’t have such an issue but corruption level is the lowest in this country. And in Armenia corruption will not lower despite the wish of people because the state itself instigates the society to bribery (especially during elections). This means that the polls conducted in Armenia and the money spent on us by the Transparency International are to a certain extent useless activity. After each election we see this process in a loop.