# **5.  Results from the Gallup World Poll**

In the previous section we saw in the Peruvian data that there were both (i) considerable differences across subgroups of the population in terms of naive estimates of guilt based on a literal interpretation of conventional survey questions about corruption, and (ii) substantial differences across subgroups in the gap between reticence-adjusted and naive estimates of corruption. This suggests that naive estimates of corruption not only underestimate its true prevalence, but may even lead to an incorrect ranking of subgroups of a population according to estimates of the prevalence of corruption.

We now investigate the same issue in a cross-country setting. Our dataset consists of household survey data from a set of Asian countries included in the 2010 wave of the Gallup World Poll (GWP). The GWP is a large cross-country survey fielded annually since 2006 in over 150 countries representing 95% of the world's adult population. The GWP gathers respondents' views on a wide range of topics, using in-depth face-to-face interviews, except in some developed economies where the survey is implemented by telephone. The core GWP questionnaire is designed to be comparable across all countries. Within each country the sample is constructed to be representative of the population aged 15 and over.

The majority of questions in the GWP are non-political, focusing on respondents' well-being, happiness, life satisfaction, expectations about the future, etc. The GWP also asks a number of questions about respondents' confidence in public institutions, as well as a specific question about respondents' personal experiences with corruption. This question, which asks whether the respondent has been in a situation in the past year where a bribe was expected, is used as the CQ.

With the generous collaboration of Gallup, we also placed a 10-question RRQ on the questionnaires used in 12 Asian countries included in the 2010 wave of the GWP. The RRQ followed the same structure as the RRQ placed in the Peru Enterprise Survey. However, the specific sensitive questions were modified to reflect the fact that the respondents were randomly-selected individuals rather than firm managers. The 10 specific questions included in the coin toss battery, together with the average number of "Yes" responses, is reported in Table 5. The seven more sensitive questions that we use in the empirical analysis are indicated in bold.

The pattern of responses to the RRQ indicates that reticent behavior is likely to be present among GWP respondents. While full compliance with the coin toss question would result in "Yes" rates of at least 50%, this is rarely the case, and particularly on the sensitive questions indicated in bold. For example, in all 12 countries, the average "Yes" rate is less than 50% on three of the sensitive questions, dealing with theft of property and with insulting a family member. The same is true in 11 out of 12 countries for the questions dealing with cheating and hiding money from family members. Taken together, fully 73 out of 84 average responses to the seven sensitive questions in 12 countries result in "Yes" rates of less than 50%.

Using the methodology described in Section 3, we compute estimates of reticence and guilt for 10 of the 12 countries where we have data on both the RRQ and the CQ. We lose one country because the CQ dealing with personal experiences with corruption was not asked in China. We also do not 14