I was sorting through some issues of Forbes magazine from the mid-70’s. One item was about American businessmen protesting anti-bribery legislation that was going through at the time. One was quoted as saying “the US is the only nation that makes bribery a crime”. Was this true then or now? What is the justification for not having bribery of government officials a crime?
That claim is definitely not true; bribery is a crime and can be punished in a lot of, if not most, nations, although, of course, practical enforcement of this varies a lot.
The legal status of bribery as a crime also varies; there are, for example, differences as to whether the person paying the bribe, or the recipient, or both are punished.
For detailed information on theory and practice of bribery around the world, Transparency International is a good source. It’s an organization, apparently modelled after AI, which aims at fighting corruption. They also rank nations in some sort of corruption index.
A question: were these businessmen protesting legislation punishing bribery of american officials or of foreign officials? Because, even though bribery of local officials has generally been punished everywhere, it used to be the case that many countries didn’t have laws against bribing foreign officials (in France, it was even, in practice, tax-deductible for companies), and such a situation would of course put the american businessmen at a disadvantage when negociating contracts in foreign countries were corruption was rampant (third world countries in particular).