"Even if we knew the total amount of bribes paid, that would not necessarily tell us much of anything about how much bribery costs society. (And that’s true even if we limited attention to economic costs, narrowly construed.) This is not an original point – lots of people have made it, and indeed it’s fairly obvious when you stop to think about it. Yet I keep seeing references to estimates of the amount of bribery that treat these figures as if they were measures of the cost of bribery… But that’s just not right."
More from Matthew Stephenson, in the Global Anticorruption Blog. http://globalanticorruptionblog.com/2015/12/15/the-amount-of-bribery-and-the-cost-of-bribery-are-not-the-same/
