Assessing Propensity for Bribe Demands
Bribe, Swindle or Steal
Alexandra Addison-Wrage of TRACE International
4.9 • 582 Ratings
🗓️ 9 December 2020
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Robert Clark, Manager of Legal Research at TRACE, discusses the TRACE Matrix, a data driven tool that assesses the likelihood—by country—of a company being asked to pay a bribe. This podcast is technical and may be of particular interest to academics and those in civil society seeking new ways to measure risk.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the podcast, Brib, Swindle, or Steel. I'm Alexandra Rogge. For today's podcast, |
| 0:11.8 | we have an edited version of a recent webinar discussing the Trace Matrix. The matrix is a data-driven |
| 0:17.2 | tool. It's updated annually and assesses the likelihood of a company being asked for |
| 0:22.0 | a bribe in each country. Scores are based on a broad review of factors correlated with bribery, |
| 0:27.3 | including levels of red tape, likelihood of prosecution, free press, and civil society, among |
| 0:32.5 | others. Our guest is Robert Clark, a lawyer and the manager of legal research for Trace. |
| 0:38.0 | Over to Robert. |
| 0:39.2 | First, I want to talk some about, for those who might not be familiar with the Matrix |
| 0:45.3 | or may only be passingly familiar, I want to talk about its structure, its content, |
| 0:51.3 | and the basic premises that inform it. |
| 0:54.3 | After that, I want to go into a little bit more detail about how we arrive at the particular scores and subscores for each of the jurisdictions covered in the Matrix. |
| 1:04.8 | The idea there is that the Matrix scores are best used if one understands where they're coming from. |
| 1:14.9 | Such an understanding is also a bit of a prerequisite to making full use of the |
| 1:20.4 | matrix data browser, which I think we introduced this two years ago. |
| 1:26.1 | It is a tool we've developed to help dig in, not only to the matrix scores themselves, but to the underlying data on which the matrix is based and to see some of the historical trends in that data. We believe that that, for those who want to do a bit of digging can help provide some very interesting context for |
| 1:45.8 | the raw scores. What the matrix is, fundamentally it is a tool for assessing country-specific |
| 1:52.9 | business bribery risk. It includes an overall score and ranking for each country, |
| 1:58.5 | 194 of them this year, but that top level score is not really |
| 2:02.5 | the meat of it. Fundamentally, the premise is that bribery risk is a complex phenomenon that |
| 2:10.4 | you can reduce it to a single number if you want to, but to really capture it, you would want to |
| 2:16.2 | look at a range of contributing factors and be able to |
| 2:21.1 | think about how those interact to yield either a higher risk or a lower risk situation. |
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