To gain an idea of the perceived severity of corruption, respondents were asked to assess the presence of five increasingly severe forms of corruption, namely favoritism, bribery, embezzlement, extortion, and fraud in the typical government department.<sup>9</sup> Results, separately for the public and private sector, as well as for different types of private entrepreneurs, are presented in table 2. This confirms that, even though more severe forms of corruption are perceived to be less common, the overall level of confidence in public institutions is quite low: more than three quarters of the respondents believe that favoritism, bribery, and embezzlement are fairly common, prevalent, or very prevalent while 56% do so for fraud and 42% for extortion. The picture does not change too much if one focuses only on those who rank different phenomena as either prevalent or very prevalent: 61% believe that favoritism is prevalent, 50% do so for bribery and embezzlement and 28% and 18%, respectively, believe that fraud and extortion are prevalent.

While one would expect public employees to assess the quality of public institutions more favorably than respondents from the private sector, differences between the two are less pronounced than one would think, echoing other studies in Africa (Goldsmith 2003): Bribery is more of a concern to foreign and local corporations than the rest. By comparison, foreign (but not local) corporations complain less about embezzlement and extortion. While favoritism seems to be a complaint particularly of local corporations, there are no systematic differences in the ranking of fraud across different parts of the private sector.

# **3.3 Households’ experience with corruption and public service provision**

Household level data allow us to complement the above ranking with measures of incidence and impact of corruption on the broader population. Table 3 reports descriptive statistics for the sample which, in view of the forced inclusion of district headquarters, is somewhat biased towards urban households.<sup>10</sup> This can be illustrated by comparing the results to what is obtained in the nationally representative Uganda National Household Survey (UNHS). We find that 15% of households, as compared to about 25% nationally, are female headed and that only 59%, as compared to about 80% in a national sample, are rural. The income gap between rural and urban areas is illustrated by the fact that 73% of the bottom quintile are from rural areas, compared to 44% in the top quintile. As to economic sectors, one-third of the sample households (49% in the bottom and 21% in the top quintile) are headed by individuals whose main source of income is the agricultural sector, 21% by traders, and about another third by professionals and craftspeople.

> parliament and the courts, as more corruptible than respondents from the private sector. The latter, by contrast, have less confidence in the integrity of the President’s Office, the IGG and the NSSF, as well as the privatization office, the ministry of defense, the immigration department, the URA, and the traffic police.

> 9 Corruption in general is defined as the use of public power for private gain. In this context, _favoritism_ implies that benefits are obtained through personal relations between those with power and those seeking favors (jobs, land, or other property), _bribery_ as the demand for payment for services that should be freely given, _embezzlement_ as the diversion of public property/money for private use, _extortion_ as the demand for money, services or other gains with threats, and _fraud_ as the use of explicitly illegal methods to obtain such private gain. Respondents were asked to assess the presence of the different forms of corruption in government on a 1-5 scale where 1 implies non-existent, 2 very limited, 3 fiarly common, 4 prevalent, 5 very prevalent.

> 10 Despite repeated requests, we were unable to obtain weights that would have allowed to generate nationally representative figures.

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