These four case studies on bribery have illustrated a full range from petty bribery (in the UK) to massive corporate bribery (Alstom), demonstrating how petty bribery mounts into large-scale systemic corruption (Panalpina) and how bribery translates into political corruption (Odebrecht). In many ways they reinforce what the literature tells us about how, why and where bribes are paid (Barr 2009; Rose-Ackerman 2010; Lord et al. 2020). Of course, trying to compare petty bribes paid by citizens with large corporate bribes to politicians is to some extent like comparing apples with pears. But at heart they are the same basic transaction – with a bribe-payer and a recipient of the bribe – governed by anti-bribery laws that are built on a set of increasingly common assumptions derived from UNCAC and the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention.

Bribery takes place everywhere. Despite the UK's consistently good performance in the Corruption Perceptions Index, we can see that bribes are paid within the UK, just as they were by Panalpina in the ports of West Africa. There is a difference in the prevalence and systemic nature of the bribe-paying, but it exists in all countries. Panalpina and Alstom demonstrate that developed economies that perform well in corruption indices can be complicit in other ways, by paying bribes in overseas jurisdictions, even if they do not do so in their domestic markets. This is sometimes described as exporting corruption, in which the demand-side from public officials is fed by the supply-side bribery of those who are willing to pay. The extraterritorial provisions in modern anti-bribery legislation were designed to capture this behaviour and were used successfully in the cases of Panalpina and Alstom under the FCPA and UK Bribery Act.

Odebrecht, by contrast, from a middle-income country with a rapidly developing economy, gives a glimpse into how the establishment of a corrupt pattern of behaviour domestically can be exported to other countries, particularly where they may be receptive to corruption due to their own poor governance, institutional weaknesses or venal political class. As corporates from emerging markets grow in size and global reach, we may expect to see more examples of the Odebrecht model. Chinese companies already have such a reputation, particularly when operating within Africa. Alstom and Panalpina also demonstrate the global nature of corruption – their bribe-paying spanned multiple countries.