Welcome back to the podcast, bribe, swindle, or steel.

I'm Alexandra Rogge and today we're talking about how companies can best measure bribery

risk on a country-by-country basis and more specifically we're going to talk about the

newly released Trace Bribery Risk Matrix.

My guest is also my colleague, Robert Clark, the architect of the Matrix.

And together with an international team of experts that worked with us closely over the past six months,

they have revised the Trace Matrix for a new release this month.

Robert, thank you for joining me. Robert, thank you for joining me.

Well, thank you for having me.

Why don't we start with a very big picture review and talk a little bit about the number

of rankings and indices that are out there trying to measure corruption?

What do you see as the main challenges for this project?

Well, it is a big challenge and one that

different entities have been wrestling with for a couple of decades now to put a number

or ranking on the level of corruption in a country. The biggest problem, I think, is sort of staring one in the face, that

corruption is not a monolithic thing within a given country. It varies from region to region,

from industry to industry. There may be variations from urban settings to rural settings.

It also takes different forms from petty shakedowns to

grand kleptocracy. That's one of the reasons why with the Matrix, we've decided to limit our

focus to a specific problem, a specific aspect of corruption, and that is the risk of business

bribery.

And the other needs were being filled in some respects by other tools, right?

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