A Strategy for Asymmetrical Measures to Reduce Bribery in Bangladesh Strategi Tindakan Asimetris untuk Mengurangi Penyuapan di Bangladesh

Bangladesh is one of the most corrupt countries with a rampant bribery scenario. In the public service sector of this country, service is almost considered to be unattainable without bribing the service providers. From the viewpoint of specialists and ad-hoc academicians, symmetric punishment measure has been a failed mechanism to stop rampant bribery. This study initially pondered the reasoning behind the severity of the bribery scenario in Bangladesh using the dataset of the National Households Survey's 2017 (NHS) of Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB). It analyzed the legal jurisdictions of bribery especially the penal code 1860. In this study, following Basu argument on the asymmetric punishment system (harassment bribe) for India, an asymmetric punishment measure has been proposed through a game theoretical explanation about how it will work for Bangladesh instead of the current symmetric one. This game-theoretical analysis shows that asymmetric punishment is more efficient for reducing rampant bribery in a country than symmetric punishment. The study suggests the government initiate an asymmetric punishment policy on bribery with a strict punitive measure and monitoring of bribe-taking which, with a qualitative approach and case study.


INTRODUCTION
Bribery is pervasive in all nation-states, especially in developing countries (CPI, 2014). It leads to an enormous wastage in revenue, social justice erosion, and human rights infringement (Verma & Sengupta, 2015).
While an individual or group pays a bribe to illegally get access to a product or service (collusive bribes), and another class where an individual or a group has to pay a bribe to get a service (harassment bribes) . Harassment bribes are when citizens have to pay corrupt officers for services that are legally entitled to citizens (Verma & Sengupta, 2015). Harassment of bribes has become the most widespread form of corruption in developing countries, particularly in India, and it increases inefficiency and delays in services (Verma & Sengupta, 2015).
Bangladesh is not an exception in this case. To National Households Survey (NHS)-2017, 49.08% of service recipient households have experienced bribery or unlawful money transaction in different sectors in Bangladesh (TIB, 2018). The study TIB (2018) stated that 89.0% of the service recipient households paid as a bribe or made the illegitimate payment for services.
However, Bangladesh has well-defined acts and laws against bribery, such as Penal code section 161-165(A), Prevention of Corruption Act (1947), Anticorruption Act (1957), and Anti-corruption Rules (1957)  legislations of Bangladesh follow symmetric punishment systems in terms of bribery and corruption. Basu (2011) has devised a new idea of asymmetric punishment for controlling bribery. He argues that if bribe-giving (not bribe-taking) is made legal, the bribe-giver (harassment bribe) will get full immunity from any punitive action by the state. However, in this paper, we examine Basu (2011) proposal for reducing bribery by analyzing the bribery and corruption scenario in Bangladesh. The paper includes a simpler analysis of what could be the game-theoretic response of the bribery counterparts -the ones who take it (government servants) and the ones who give it (households) while taking or giving bribes in Bangladesh. This analysis will help readers decide whether or not the author's argument about this administration policy (asymmetric measure along with a harassment bribe) of, for now, reducing bribery is recommendable for Bangladesh.

RESEARCH METHOD
In this study, following Basu (2011) argument on an asymmetric punishment system (bribery abuse) for India, an asymmetric penalty measure has been proposed through a game theoretical explanation of how it would work for Bangladesh rather than the current symmetric one. This study uses a qualitative approach and case study with Miles & Huberman (1994) interactive analysis techniques. To test Basu (2011) proposal to reduce bribery by analyzing bribery and corruption scenarios in Bangladesh. Whether the argument is about this administration policy (asymmetric actions along with harassment bribery), for now, bribe reduction is recommended for Bangladesh or not.

Result
Bribery has been practised since the initial stage of human civilization, notably in the state's economic, administrative, and political arena (Jancsics,POLITICON : Jurnal Ilmu Politik Vol.4 No.2 ; 2019). Its purpose is to produce reciprocity of benefits through money and power politic (Anggoro et al., 2022). In contrast, an individual or group pays a bribe to illegally get access to a product or service (collusive bribes) and another class where an individual or a group has to pay a bribe to get a service (harassment bribes) (Verma & Sengupta, 2015). Basu (2011) also defines harassment bribes as 'people give to get something they are entitled to (e.g., a passport or ration card or for getting investment licenses)'. Like Basu (2011), Verma and Sengupta (2015) stated that harassment bribes are when citizens have to pay corrupt officers for services that are legally entitled to citizens.
When someone is complicit in taking or giving bribes or ensuring private interests by abusing an official position, they do not feel guilt or regret (Dixit, 2017). Bribery results in the inefficiencies of misallocation and delays, which considers the twin vices of a corrupt bureaucracy (Asea, 2018).
Harassment of bribes has become the most widespread form of corruption in developing countries, particularly in India, and it increases inefficiency and delays in services (Verma and Sengupta, 2015;Basu, 2011). As a result, qualified applicants suffer delays in receiving licenses and other services, but inefficient people receive services ahead of them (Asea, 2018). Bribes for getting an investment license lessen the incentive to invest and adversely influence efficiency, investment, and growth (Muurlink & Macht, 2020).
Bribery leads to a substantial revenue loss and has choked off large parts of economic transactions (Verma and Sengupta, 2015).
Many developing countries, especially Indonesia, have different decentralized ministries (after the enactment of the decentralization law in 2001), but the decentralization policy didn't reduce corruption in Indonesia (Muurlink & Macht, 2020). The discretionary power of bureaucrats allows for extracting bribes (Asea, 2018). So, reducing the monopoly or discretionary power of bureaucracy is one way to lessen the incidents of bureaucratic corruption in the country (Asea, 2018) (Serra, 2012), and monitoring and punishment also lead to a higher average bribe (Dwenger et al., 2016).
To reduce bribery, some academicians attempted to break down some administration policies considering the political and economic scenario of the countries (Basyal et al., 2018). Almost all of them pondered the policymakers sticking to a punishment-based solution to this rampant bribery. The question remains 'does it help to increase cooperation and efficiency? Campos-Vazquez and Mejia (2016) stated that the option of punishment increases cooperation, but the sensitivity to punishment is greater in the high-monitoring. Moreover, raising the penalty on the bribe-giver makes bribing costly while reducing the penalty for the bribe-taker, but this scenario has not visible in any country (Muurlink & Macht, 2020). Several countries like India, the USA, the UK, and France are enshrined symmetric punishment in bribery laws (Engel et al., 2016). Asymmetric liability facilitates a significant reduction in bribery incidents compared to symmetric liability under generic circumstances (Verma and Sengupta, 2015). Similarly, Abbink et al. (2014) also found that asymmetric laws against bribery (e.g., harassment bribes) reduce corruption rates. But, Engel, Goerg and Yu (2016) concluded their experiment with an opposite finding that asymmetric penalties also increased corruption by giving the briber a credible way of transaction. Basu (2011) has come up with a new idea about the control of bribery.
He argues that if bribe-giving (not bribe-taking) is made legal, the bribe-giver (harassment bribe) will get full immunity from any punitive action by the state.
After paying the bribe, bribe-givers will get incentives (be able to collect their money back) to blow the whistle, and bribe-takers face a hefty punishment and have to return the bribe after being caught. Basu argues that bribe-takers will hesitate to take bribes after knowing this, which helps "sharp decline in the incidence of harassment bribe". Verma and Sengupta (2015) found that Basu proposal of asymmetric penalty significantly reduces bribery incidents under certain conditions. Ryvkin and Serra (2017) and Abbink et al (2014) supported Basu proposal of an asymmetric penalty scheme and found that the inability of the bribe-takers to react against the bribe-giver correlates with the reduction in bribery incidents (Ryvkin & Serra, 2017). In an endogenous environment, implementing Basu proposal produced mixed results; one, the policy could reduce welfare and another, it would reduce harassment and non-harassment bribes (Oak, 2015). In a study, Dreze (2012) criticized the proposal of Basu (2011) that legalizing bribe giving will decline incidents of bribery sharply and has said that this hypothesis is incorrect. He stated that bribe-giver has three options (don't pay a bribe; pay a bribe and blow the whistle, and pay a bribe but don't blow the whistle); when bribe-giving is made legal, bribe-givers will switch to the third option, which leads to increase incidences of bribery-not decrease. Although, Basu, Basu and Cordella (2016) once again suggested that asymmetric punishment will help to disappear if penalties are sufficiently high; otherwise, bribe sizes will rise.

Legal jurisdictions of Bribery in Bangladesh
Bribery has been well defined as a crime in the legislature and acts of "Whoever, being or expecting to be a public servant, accepts or obtains, or agrees to accept, or attempts to obtain from any person, for himself or any other person any gratification whatever, other than legal remuneration, as a motive or reward for doing or forbearing to do any official act or for showing or forbearing to show, in the exercise of his official functions, favour or disfavour to any person, or for rendering or attempting to render any service or disservice to any person, with the government or legislature, or with any public servant, as such shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to three years, or with fine, or with both." Here, Public Servant is defined in section 21 of the penal code as an employee of any Corporation or other body or organization set up by the government and included under any law. And gratification, as mentioned in this section act, refers to anything that pleases the public servant to do or not to do anything in favour of a person or not favour a person. Gratification doesn't only count money and is not restricted to pecuniary gratifications.
Legal remuneration means the official salaries or benefits that the government fixes for that specific public servant. Some Other kinds of bribery are also mentioned in Section 165 of the penal code 1860 (bdlaws.minlaw.gov, 2020): "Whoever, being a public servant, accepts or obtains, or agrees to accept or attempts to obtain, for himself, or any other person, any valuable thing without consideration, or for a consideration which he knows to be inadequate, from any person whom he knows to have been, or to be, or to be likely to be concerned in any proceeding or business transacted or about to be transacted by such public servant, or having any connection with the official functions of himself or of any public servant to whom he is subordinate, or from any person whom he knows to be interested in or related to the person so concerned, shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to three years, or with fine, or with both." Following the two sections, bribery is defined in the legal book as: 1. Accepting, obtaining, agreement to accept, attempts to take any gratification whatsoever to give favour or disfavour to any person other POLITICON : Jurnal Ilmu Politik Vol.4 No.2 ; 2. Taking any valuable thing without consideration of its consequences from the vendors.
As the penal code firmly dictates that if any of the public servants are proven guilty of taking any gratification or valuable thing (as a bribe) to do a favour or disfavour, then they shall be punished for a year of imprisonment, which may extend to three years, or they will be fined or at most criminal charges, both of them. It may seem quite praise-worthy, but It's not since section 165(A) dictates the same punishment for abetting individuals. The penal code (165-A) says: "Whoever abets any offence punishable under section 161 or section 165 shall, whether the offence abetted is or is not committed in consequence of the abetment, be punished with the punishment provided for the offence." These abettors are the individuals who are connected to or engaged in bribery. If somebody wants to give a bribe to a public servant as a harassment bribe to blow the whistle, he will be punished with the same punishment under section 161. This clearly states that Bangladesh follows a symmetric punishment system regarding corruption and bribery.

Current Bribery Scenario in Bangladesh
As a form of corruption, bribery has gradually become widespread, especially in developing countries. Bangladesh is not an exception in this case.
Merrily this nation is a severe example of rampant bribery. According to National Households Survey (NHS)-2017, 49.08% of service recipient households have experienced bribery or unlawful transaction of money in different sectors in Bangladesh, which makes this corruption (i.e., bribery) the 'most visible form of corruption to be mal-practised (TIB, 2018). The data indicates that about 50% (half of the total service recipients) paid bribes or were forced to make illegitimate payments while taking the services from government or non-government service-providing sectors.    So, bribery is simply considered a part of the system in this country's bureaucracy. All these graphs we have shown above relate to this statement because high documentation of bribery is present in this country.

Analysis and Discussion Game Theoretic Analysis of Asymmetric Punishment
The control of the rampant bribery rate has become a policy headache for the last two decades in Bangladesh. Bangladesh follows the symmetric punishment system but has become an inefficient method of fighting against bribery. Imposing an equal punishment over both parties (bribe-takers and bribe givers) in bribery action increases the rate of bribery. The public servant who takes the bribe from a service recipient gets a full indemnity or immunity while taking the bribe because they are consensually entitled to cooperate. To discuss this matter -symmetric measure-in a pragmatic way in the context of Bangladesh, we take an exemplification of the most corrupt sector of the country-BRTA (Bangladesh Road Transport Authorities) (TIB, 2018).
For a facile policy-oriented game-theoretic analysis, we waive the parties engaged in bribery into two, bribe giver (X) and bribe-taker (Y). As the current legal barrier to bribery occurrences is symmetric, both parties are interested in maximizing their profit, i.e., want to be better off trading their respective service/deal. So there lies cooperation, which increases the probability of bribery (Mushkat & Mushkat, 2020). How do they cooperate? Suppose X (bribe giver) wants to get a driving license from BRTA and Y (bribe-taker) is the government official entitled to provide the service to him. Now, X has two options, bribing the official or refusing to bribe. On the contrary, Y can either take the bribe or refuse to take it. The following game-theoretic analysis provides a clear scenario of the situation aforementioned: player, and the Nash equilibrium of this game depends on their willingness to take the bribe. Due to having no extra punishment in our country's penal codes (symmetric punishment) for taking the bribe, the bribe-taker has a high probability of taking the bribe and cooperating with the bribe giver getting their entitled service. So, the Nash equilibrium will be {(α-ƛα), ƛα}, bribe-taker will take the bribe from the bribe giver without any fear of getting caught.
Because if they get caught, then the bribe giver gets caught, and both will face the same punishment. Basu (2011) thus stated that symmetric punishment measure doesn't work in reducing the bribery rate. Instead, Basu (2011) proposed an asymmetric punishment system, particularly for harassment bribes to reduce rampant bribery.
However, this sophisticated idea of asymmetric punishment is not new at the public administration level. The United States and the European Union use conditional immunity to deter cartels (Marvão & Spagnolo, 2014). But, Basu asymmetric punishment is rare in the case of bribery. Although, it has been practised for a long time in different territories. In China and Taiwan, bribe giving is a crime only if the player receives illegal benefits (Li, 2012). In Romania, the bribe giver is sometimes entitled to have their payments returned to them (Rose-Ackerman, 2010).
Our idea of motivating the asymmetric punishment system for reducing bribery in Bangladesh involves harassment bribes, where a percentage is demanded from the citizens. However, the citizens already meet the required conditions to receive the service (i.e., driving license, pension fund and the whistleblowers get full immunity. Moreover, there will be a distrust dilemma among the bribe-occurrence parties. Then, if the public servant realizes that if the bribe giver blows the whistle, the public servant will be restricting their stubbornness for taking a bribe while providing a public service. In this game, unlike the symmetric game, a punishment outcome (β) is added with the bribe taker's activity, i.e., if the bribe giver blows the whistle, then the public servant will face fined along with punishment. If the bribetaker wants to take the bribe, they will pay a cost to trust the bribe giver.
Henceforth, suppose X (bribe-taker) takes the bribe, and the bribe giver blows the whistle. In that case, the outcome will be {α, (-ƛα-β)} which means X (bribetaker) will have to return the bribed money and also will have to face the enforced immediate punishment for taking part in bribery. If the bribe-taker refuses to take a bribe because of the higher cost of bribe-taking, then the bribe doesn't take place, and the service recipient household gets the full amount they are entitled to. What if the bribe giver wants to remain silent after bribing a public servant? In this case, whistleblowing depends on the size of the bribed money. If the bribe size is large, then the probability of whistleblowing is too high (Karna Basu et al., 2016). So, in the asymmetric punishment where bribe giving is legal, the Nash outcome will be either {α, (-ƛα-β)} or {(α-ƛα), ƛα} depends entirely on the bribe giver's whistleblowing. So, the model of asymmetric punishment system will create a distrust dilemma among the public servants and thus, they will, in most cases, restrain themselves from taking bribes.

Arguments of Asymmetric Measure for Bangladesh
From a historical link, Bangladesh has exercised symmetric punishment laws against bribery incidents for the last two decades. Are which may extend to three years or will be fined, both of them if they are proven guilty). Symmetric game-theoretic analysis (Table 2) shows that in a symmetric punishment measure, the probability of taking a bribe is high because of coordinated action between the parties and the Nash equilibrium outcome lies in {(α-ƛα), ƛα}-while the public servant (bribe-taker) will take the bribe from the households (bribe-giver) without any fear of getting caught.
In this game, the bribe-taker is the dominant player indeed, and the bribe-giver willingly gives the bribe to get service either to get it hurriedly or to mitigate the uncertainty and harassment in it. They (bribe-giver) also bypass the whistle blow because they have the same punishment for both.
However, having no extra punishment for bribe-taker, the symmetric punishment of Bangladesh does not efficiently work to reduce bribery rates in the country. On the contrary, the bribery incidents (e.g., total national estimates, rates of bribery, and the average bribe payment of households) are increasing (TIB, 2018). So, Will asymmetric punishment measure be a better option for Bangladesh than symmetric punishment? As asymmetric game- theoretic analysis (figure 5) shows that bribe giver or whistleblower is the dominant player in the game (by getting a full immunity with incentives of getting back his bribed money) and Nash equilibria {α, (-ƛα-β)} or {(α-ƛα), ƛα,} depends entirely on bribe giver's whistleblowing action. While bribe giver prefers whistleblowing ensures a high outcome {α, (-ƛα-β)} which means bribe giver will get back the bribed money with getting full immunity ( Table 3). As a result, there will produce a distrust dilemma between bribe-takers and bribegivers; bribe-takers have a higher cost of taking bribes. So, they (bribe-taker) will restrain themselves from taking bribes as a rational player in the asymmetric game; then, the bribery happening gets reduced ( Table 3). As Basu, Basu and Cordella (2016) showed that asymmetric punishment (expected penalties) controls or contributes to reducing bribery rates in the country. Moreover, several studies found that asymmetric punishment successfully reduces bribery incidents (Abbink et al., 2014;Ryvkin & Serra, 2017;Verma & Sengupta, 2015).
The asymmetric game-theoretic analysis and several studies show that asymmetric punishment is more efficient for reducing rampant bribery in a country than symmetric punishment. So, the bribery incidents will reduce, or least of all, will be controlled if Bangladesh legalizes and allows the idea of asymmetric punishment (i.e., bribe-givers get full immunity with a return of the bribed money, and bribe-taker get punishment) against bribery. system must be costlier than bribe givers whistleblowing because, in the case of bribe givers, there's merely any cost or investment of the state. All the shreds of evidence and proof of bribery must be produced before the court in charging and criminalizing the bribery allegations, which bribe givers will intentionally do because of their benefits.

CONCLUSION
Bribery has become widespread, especially in developing countries like Bangladesh. In the study, we have built a simple game-theoretical model to examine the effectiveness of symmetric and asymmetric liability to bribery reduction for current rampant practices of bribery in Bangladesh. Our gametheoretical model, however, mostly relied upon harassment bribes. Our gametheoretical model of asymmetric punishment measure evaluates the effectiveness of an asymmetric liability that provides legal immunity to bribe givers to encourage whistleblowing. Whistleblowing by the citizen is a powerful tool against the official who refuses to provide services that the citizen is entitled to. When asymmetric liability legally allows whistleblowing, it will create distrust among the bribery-acting parties. When the distrust dilemma creates between the bribe giver and the bribe-taker, the study shows that the probability of bribery happening will be reduced. Whereas our gametheoretic model of symmetric liability shows that the probability of taking a bribe is high because of coordinated action between the parties, the bribegiver gives the bribe to get service to avoid harassment. However, the asymmetric game-theoretic analysis shows that asymmetric punishment is more efficient for reducing rampant bribery in a country than symmetric punishment.
Our game-theoretical model of asymmetric punishment measure for Bangladesh depicts the result of a distrust dilemma among the players, lessening the probability of bribe-taking. In the asymmetric punishment measure, the bribe-taker (public servant) will face punishment at least larger than the bribe givers. While asymmetric liability legalizes bribe giving with an offer of full indemnity and immunity for bribe givers, there will have a higher probability of whistleblowing by bribe givers. In such cases, our gametheoretical model produces Nash equilibrium-where bribe givers will get a return for bribed money with immunity, and bribe-takers will penalize after being caught. However, the study shows that whistleblowing and bribery detection entirely depend on the bribe-takers expected punishment. In the case of Bangladesh, the symmetric punishment measure doesn't give any incentives to the bribe givers for whistleblowing. So, an asymmetric punishment policy will reduce the occurrences of bribery, and bribe givers will get incentives for whistleblowing with indemnity and immunity. Finally, the asymmetric punishment, the first proposal of its kind for Bangladesh, might increase bribery detection and lessen the cases of bribery. India initiated the asymmetric measure in 2012-13 and benefited from it; similarly, Bangladesh can introduce this policy.