From the website IPaidaBribe.com A few months ago I stumbled on Kaushik Basu's fascinating and readable 2011 paper Why, for a Class of Bribes, the Act of Giving a Bribe should be Treated as Legal . In the context of Narendra Modi's massive demonetization campaign, which has as one of its goals a reduction in corruption, I thought it was a timely moment to shine the spotlight on Basu's idea. To reduce bribery, the act of giving a bribe should be legalized, suggests World Bank Chief Economist @kaushikcbasu https://t.co/xORxMAjcNq pic.twitter.com/bqOI0uOI36 — JP Koning (@jp_koning) September 25, 2016 One reason that bribery often goes undetected by authorities is that the bribe giver and the bribe taker are incentivized to cooperate with each other in order to keep a bribe secret. After all, the law typically treats both parties as equally guilty—work together and no one gets in trouble. Basu's idea is to upend this symmetry by having the bribe giver face a differen...