According to a recent survey, Thailand remains a country where bribes are commonplace.
Transparency International, an agency monitoring corruption, recently published their 2017 report titled, “People and Corruption: Asia Pacific.”
The study focused on the answers of almost 22,000 people living in 16 countries and territories in the region. A large number of people reported paying a bribe in the last 12 months for services related to basic needs such as education and healthcare.
The number of people paying bribes in the places surveyed varied greatly, however. For example, only 0.2 percent of Japanese people had paid a bribe while a whopping 69 percent of Indians had.
As many as 41 percent of the Thais surveyed had paid a bride over the last year. To compare that to neighboring countries, 65 percent of Vietnamese respondents had paid a bribe, 40 percent of Cambodian and Burmese had, 32 percent of Malaysians had, 26 percent of Chinese had, and 23 percent of Indonesians had.
Thailand’s government has been attempting to crack down on bribery but many have said that they ignore high-ranking ministers and other officials that accept graft.
Police were reported as the most common people to ask for bribes. A little less than a third of people who had contact with a cop in the last year were forced to pay them a bribe, according to the survey.
It also seems that, the younger or poorer you are, the more likely you are to be asked for a bribe — 38 percent of people surveyed in the lowest income bracket said they had paid a bribe while those under age 35 had also been asked the most often, according to The Nation.
However, both men and women were asked to pay bribes in almost equal numbers, 30 percent of males had been asked to pay while 27 percent of females had been asked to cough up some dough.
