I was talking to a po-faced wife of a university chum a few years ago, when I was working in Iraq. When I said that it was still a very corrupt country she looked at me with pure hatred and said "that's a bit racist". I asked if she had ever been there - no. I then pointed out that due to cultural norms, and the myriad of factions in the country (village, tribal, regional, religious...) and that they had just come through years of conflict in the form of an occupation and civil war, that forward planning was essentially not possible and that the 'take what is available now' was the prevalent thinking. I offered no judgement on it other than to say it happened and that we in the west liked to think that we were above this behaviour, only we did it in a different way (seats on the board, non-executive directorships etc). She still looked prune-faced and happily did not speak to me for the rest of the evening.
Another country worth mentioning is Switzerland. A land of order, punctuality, strict adherence to a civic code (cleaning snow off pavements outside your house etc) but of astonishing laxity when it comes to the provenance of funds so long as they get to manage them. I'd have to double check my source, but supposedly Eisenhower was so determined to punish the Swiss for their "neutrality" (think of the countless Jewish families still trying to get their money and paintings back) that he stopped all coal trains entering the country during the winter of 1945, thereby forcing people to use up their precious wood reserves and even having to burn property in order to stay warm.
Corruption is pretty much everywhere. It's just practiced in different ways and there is a form of snobbery about what form of it is deemed acceptable.