What seems to be ignored is that in many countries, what is considered Corrupt by US standards is merely standard business practice, not corruption when viewed in the foreign context. For instance, to get a driver's license in Co^te d'Ivoire, where I was a teenager, I'd have had to pay to take Driver's Ed (although I knew how to drive - but this was also the case in Massachusetts when I tried to get a license there in college), pay the government fee for the license (same as the US), and pay some dash to the guy handing out the license (difference). Americans tend to consider Step 3 to be a "bribe" and thus tak it as evidence of "corruption" - well, by that token, tipping the waitstaff is a bribe. It's in the pay scale of the hander-outer that he gets some of his $$ straight from the customer, not the employer, same as waitstaff getting lower salaries because it's expected that the customer will pay something over the top. The ethnocentric bias should not be underestimated. Needless to say, I had to wait till we left Africa to get a driver's license as my US-government-employed father wasn't allowed to pay the dash which everyone else considered simply part of the fee to get a license. Luckily we had dip plates so nobody was going to pull me over anyway...