I think the drawbacks would cancel it out.

I travel to India often, so am familiar with day to day corruption. I know what you mean about getting things done faster, but I think that’s simply from our perspective. For every 1 person who “accelerates” or purchases an illegal “service”, there are countless others who could not jump over the hurdle of graft.

For example, we were trying to establish a refinery in India. Hundreds and hundreds of applications were rejected by competitors until we came through with a 25,000 INR fee. This serves the purpose of stifling growth because multitudes of able-bodied competitors were turned away. Not to mention poor allocation of resources: 25k rupees could’ve been used for capital purchases or labor purchases, but instead they went towards our entry fee.

Lots of deadweight losses associated with graft. It’s universally a bad thing unless you’re the one benefitting from it.